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THE HARTFORD-LAMSON LECTURES 
ON THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD 

VOLUME I 

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY 
OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION 



•?&&& 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE HARTFORD-LAMSON LECTURES ON 
THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD 



AN INTRODUCTION 



TO THE STUDY OF 



COMPARATIVE RELIGION 



BY 



FRANK BYRON JEVONS 

PRINCIPAL OF BISHOP HATFIELD'S HALL, DURHAM 
UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, ENGLAND 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1908 

All rights reserved 






J I wo Sooies Kecet«o4> I 

OCT 17 W08 I 

Lo3E'fi,v s fc» 

0Ut$& (V AAc, nwl 



Copyright, 1908, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908. 



J. 3. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



NOTE 

The Hartford-Lamson Lectures on "The Re- 
ligions of the World " are delivered at Hartford 
Theological Seminary in connection with the Lam- 
son Fund, which was established by a group of 
friends in honor of the late Charles M. Lamson, 
D.D., sometime President of the American Board 
of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to assist 
in preparing students for the foreign missionary 
field. The Lectures are designed primarily to 
give to such students a good knowledge of the 
religious history, beliefs, and customs of the peo- 
ples among whom they expect to labor. As they 
are delivered by scholars of the first rank, who are 
authorities in their respective fields, it is expected 
that in published form they will prove to be of 
value to students generally. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction . . i 

Immortality 34 

Magic 70 

Fetichism . .105 

Prayer . . . 138 

Sacrifice 175 

Morality 211 

Christianity . . . . . . . . 239 

Appendix 267 

Bibliography 271 

Index 275 



Vll 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF 
CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 

The use of any science lies in its application to practical pur- 
poses. For Christianity, the use of the science of religion 
consists in applying it to show that Christianity is the 
highest manifestation of the religious spirit. To make 
this use of the science of religion, we must fully and 
frankly accept the facts it furnishes, and must recognise 
that others are at liberty to use them for any opposite pur- 
pose. But we must also insist that the science of religion 
is limited to the establishment of facts and is excluded 
from passing judgment on the religious value of those 
facts. The science of religion as a historical science is con- 
cerned with the chronological order, and not with the reli- 
gious value, of its facts ; and the order of those facts does 
not determine their value any more in the case of religion 
than in the case of literature or art. But if their value is a 
question on which the science refuses to enter, it does not 
follow that the question is one which does not admit of a 
truthful answer: science has no monopoly of truth. The 
value of anything always implies a reference to the future: 
to be of value a thing must be of use for some purpose, 
and what is purposed is in the future. Things have 
value, or have not, according as they are useful or not 
for our purposes. The conviction that we can attain our 
purposes and ideals, the conviction without which we 
should not even attempt to attain them is faith; and it 
is in faith and by faith that the man of religion proposes to 



X ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Pages 
conquer the world. It is by faith in Christianity that the 
missionary undertakes to convert men to Christianity. 
The comparative value of different religions can only be 
ascertained by comparison of those religions; and the 
missionary, of all men, ought to know what is to be 
learnt from such comparison. It is sometimes supposed 
(wrongly) that to admit that all religions are comparable 
is to admit that all are identical ; but, in truth, it is only 
because they differ that it is possible to compare them. 
For the purpose of comparison both the differences and 
the resemblances must be assumed to exist; and even 
for the purposes of the science of religion there is noth- 
ing to compel us to postulate a period in which either 
the differences or the resemblances were non-existent. 
But though there is nothing to compel us to assume that 
the lowest form in which religion is found was neces- 
sarily the earliest to exist, it is convenient for us to start 
from the lowest forms. For the practical purposes of 
the missionary it is desirable where possible to discover 
any points of resemblance or traits of connection between 
the lower form with which his hearers are familiar and 
the higher form to which he proposes to lead them. It 
is therefore proper for him and reasonable in itself to 
look upon the long history of religion as man's search 
for God, and to regard it as the function of the mis- 
sionary to keep others in that search z~33 

IMMORTALITY 

The belief in immortality is more prominent, though less 
intimately bound up with religion, amongst uncivilised 
than it is amongst civilised peoples. In early times 
the fancy luxuriates, unchecked, on this as on other 
matters. It is late in the history of religion that the 
immortality of the soul is found to be postulated alike 
by morality and religion. The belief that the soul 
exists after death doubtless manifested itself first in the 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS XI 

fact that men dream of those who have died. But, were 
there no desire to believe, it may be doubted whether 
the belief would survive, or even originate. The belief 
originates in desire, in longing for one loved and lost; 
and dreams are not the cause of that desire, though they 
are one region in which it manifests itself, or rather one 
mode of its manifestation. The desire is for continued 
communion; and its gratification is found in a spiritual 
communion. Such communion also is believed to unite 
worshippers both with one another and with their God. 
Where death is regarded as a disruption of communion 
between the living and the departed, death is regarded 
as unnatural, as a violation of the original design of 
things, which calls for explanation; and the explanation 
is provided in myths which account for it by showing that 
the origin of death was due to accident or mistake. At 
first, it is felt that the mistake cannot be one without 
remedy: the deceased is invited "to come to us again." 
If he does not return in his old body, then he is believed 
to reappear in some new-born child. Or the doctrine of 
rebirth may be satisfied by the belief that the soul is 
reincarnated in animal form. This belief is specially 
likely to grow up where totem ancestors are believed to 
manifest themselves in the shape of some animal. Belief 
in such animal reincarnation has, in its origin, how- 
ever, no connection with any theory that transmigration 
from a human to an animal form is a punishment. Up 
to this point in the evolution of the belief in immortality, 
the belief in another world than this does not show 
itself. Even when ancestor-worship begins to grow up, 
the ancestors* field of operations is in this world, rather 
than in the next. But the fact that their aid and pro- 
tection can be invoked by the community tends to elevate 
them to the level of the god or gods of the community. 
This tendency, however, may be defeated, as it was in 
Judaea, where the religious sentiment will not permit 
the difference between God and man to be blurred. 



X1L ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Pages 
Where the fact that the dead do not return establishes 
itself as incontrovertible, the belief grows up that as the 
dead continue to exist, it is in another world that their 
existence must continue. At first they are conceived 
to continue to be as they are remembered to have been 
in this life. Later the idea grows up that they are pun- 
ished or rewarded there, according as they have been 
bad or good here; according as they have or have not in 
this life sought communion with the true God. This 
belief thus differs entirely from the earlier belief, e.g. as 
it is found amongst the Eskimo, that it is in this world 
the spirits of the departed reappear, and that their con- 
tinued existence is unaffected by considerations of moral- 
ity or religion. It is, however, not merely the belief in 
the next world that may come to be sanctified by religion 
and moralised. The belief in reincarnation in animal 
form may come to be employed in the service of religion 
and morality, as it is in Buddhism. There, however, 
what was originally the transmigration of souls was trans- 
formed by Gotama into the transmigration of character; 
and the very existence of the individual soul, whether 
before death or after, was held to be an illusion and a 
deception. This tenet pushes the doctrine of self- 
sacrifice, which is essential both to religion and to 
morality, to an extreme which is fatal in logic to morality 
and religion alike: communion between man and God — 
the indispensable presupposition of both religion and 
morals — is impossible, if the very existence of man is 
illusory. The message of the missionary will be that by 
Christianity self-sacrifice is shown to be the condition of 
morality, the essence of communion with God and the 
way to life eternal 34-69 

MAGIC 
A view sometime held was that magic is religion, and religion 
magic. With equal reason, or want of reason, it might 
be held that magic was science, and science magic. 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Xlll 

Even if we correct the definition, and say that to us 
magic appears, in one aspect, as a spurious system of 
science; and, in another, as a spurious system of re- 
ligion ; we still have to note that, for those who believed 
in it, it could not have been a spurious system, whether 
of science or religion. Primitive man acts on the assump- 
tion that he can produce like_±>y means of like; and about 
that assumption there is no " magic" of any kind. It is 
only when an effect thus produced is a thing not com- 
monly done and not generally approved of, that it is 
regarded as magic; and it is magic, because not every 
one knows how to do it, or not every one has the power 
to do it, or not every one cares to do it. About this 
belief, so long as every one entertains it, there is nothing 
spurious. When however it begins to be suspected that 
the magician has not the power to do what he professes, 
his profession tends to become fraudulent and his belief 
spurious. On the other hand, a thing commonly done 
and generally approved of is not regarded as magical 
merely because the effect resembles the cause, and like is 
in this instance produced by like. Magic is a term of evil 
connotation; and the practice of using like to produce like 
is condemned when and because it is employed for anti- 
social purposes. Such practices are resented by the 
society, amongst whom and on whom they are em- 
ployed; and they are offensive to the God who looks 
after the interests of the community. In fine, the object 
and purpose of the practice determines the attitude of the 
community towards the practice: if the object is anti- 
social, the practice is nefarious ; and the witch, if " smelled 
out," is killed. The person who is willing to undertake 
such nefarious proceedings comes to be credited with a 
nefarious personality, that is to say, with both the power 
and the will to do what ordinary, decent members of 
the community could not and would not do: personal 
power comes to be the most important, because the 
most mysterious, characteristic of the man believed to 



XIV ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Pages 
be a magician. If we turn to things, such as rain-making, 
which are socially beneficial, we find a similar growth in 
the belief that some men have extraordinary power to 
work wonders on behalf of the tribe. A further stage of 
development is reached when the man who uses his per- 
sonal power for nefarious purposes undertakes by means 
of it to control spirits : magic then tends to pass into fetich- 
ism. Similarly, when rain and other social benefits come 
to be regarded as gifts of the gods, the power of the rain- 
maker comes to be regarded as a power to procure from 
the gods' the gifts that they have to bestow : magic is dis- 
placed by religion. The opposition of principle between 
magic and religion thus makes itself manifest. It makes 
itself manifest in that the one promotes social and the 
other anti-social purposes: the spirit worshipped by any 
community as its god is a spirit who has the interests of 
the community at heart, and who ex officio condemns 
and punishes those who by magic or otherwise work 
injury to the members of the community. Finally, the 
decline of the belief in magic is largely due to the dis- 
covery that it does not produce the effects it professes to 
bring about. But the missionary will also dwell on the 
fact that his hearers feel it to be anti-social and to be con- 
demned alike by their moral sentiments and their re- 
ligious feeling 70-104 

FETICHISM 

Fetichism is regarded by some as a stage of religious develop- 
ment, or as the form of religion found amongst men at 
the lowest stage of development known to us. From this 
the conclusion is sometimes drawn that fetichism is the 
source of all religion and of all religious values; and, 
therefore, that (as fetichism has no value) religion (which 
is an evolved form of fetichism) has no value either. 
This conclusion is then believed to be proved by the 
science of religion. In fact, however, students of the 
science of religion disclaim this conclusion and rightly 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS XV 

assert that the science does not undertake to prove any- 
thing as to the truth or the value of religion. 

Much confusion prevails as to what fetichism is; and the 
confusion is primarily due to Bosnian. He confuses, 
while the science of religion distinguishes between, animal 
gods and fetiches. He asserts what we now know to be 
false, viz., that a fetich is an inanimate object and nothing 
more; and that the native rejects, or "breaks," one of 
these gods, knowing it to be a god. 

Any small object which happens to arrest the attention of a 
negro, when he has a desire to gratify, may impress him 
as being a fetich, i.e. as having power to help him to 
gratify his desire. Here, Hoffding says, is the simplest 
conceivable construction of religious ideas: here is 
presented religion under the guise of desire. Let it be 
granted, then, that the object attracts attention and is 
involuntarily associated with the possibility of attaining 
the desired end. It follows that, as in the period of ani- 
mism, all objects are believed to be animated by spirits, 
fetich objects are distinguished from other objects by 
the fact — not that they are animated by spirits but — 
that it is believed they will aid in the accomplishment of 
the desired end. The picking up of a fetich object, how- 
ever, is not always followed by the desired result; and 
the negro then explains "that it has lost its spirit." 
The spirit goes out of it, indeed, but may perchance be 
induced or even compelled to return into some other 
object; and then fetiches may be purposely made as 
well as accidentally found, and are liable to coercion as 
well as open to conciliation. 

But, throughout this process, there is no religion. Religion 
is the worship of the gods of a community by the com- 
munity for the good of the community. The cult of a 
fetich is conducted by an individual for his private ends; 
and the most important function of a fetich is to work 
evil against those members of the community who have 
incurred the fetich owner's resentment. Thus religion 



XVI ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Pages 
and fetich-worship are directed to ends not merely 
different but antagonistic. From the very outset re- 
ligion in social fetichism is anti-social. To seek the 
origin of religion in fetichism is vain. Condemned, 
wherever it exists, by the religious and moral feelings 
of the community, fetichism cannot have been the 
primitive religion of mankind. The spirits of fetich- 
ism, according to Hdffding, become eventually the gods 
of polytheism: such a spirit, so long as it is a fetich, 
is "the god of a moment," and must come to be per- 
manent if it is to attain to the ranks of the polytheistic 
gods. But fetiches, even when their function becomes 
permanent, remain fetiches and do not become gods. 
They do not even become "departmental gods," for 
their powers are to further a man's desires generally. 
On the other hand, they have personality, even if they 
have not personal names. Finally, if, as Hoffding be- 
lieves, the word "god" originally meant "he who is 
worshipped," and gods are worshipped by the commu- 
nity, then fetiches, as they are nowhere worshipped by 
the community, are in no case gods. 
The function of the fetich is anti-social; of the gods, to pro- 
mote the well-being of the community. To maintain that 
a god is evolved out of a fetich is to maintain that prac- 
tices destructive of society have only to be pushed far 
enough and they will prove the salvation of society . 105-137 

PRAYER 
Prayer is a phenomenon in the history of religion to which 
the science of religion has devoted but little attention — 
the reason alleged being that it is so simple and familiar 
as not to demand detailed study. It may, however, be 
that the phenomenon is indeed familiar yet not simple. 
Simple or not, it is a matter on which different views 
may be held. Thus though it may be agreed that in 
the lower forms of religion it is the accomplishment of 
desire that is asked for, a divergence of opinion emerges 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS XV11 

the moment the question is put, Whose desire? that of 
the individual or of the community ? And instances may 
be cited to show that it is not for his own personal, 
selfish advantage alone that the savage always or even 
usually prays. It is the desires of the community that 
the god of the community is concerned to grant: the 
petition of an individual is offered and harkened to only 
so far as it is not prejudicial to the interests of the com- 
munity. The statement that savage prayer is unethical 
may be correct in the sense that pardon for moral sin is 
not sought; it is incorrect, if understood to mean that 
the savage does not pray to do the things which his 
morality makes it incumbent on him to do, e.g. to fight 
successfully. The desires which the god is prayed to 
grant are ordinarily desires which, being felt by each 
and every member of the community, are the desires of 
the community, as such, and not of any one member 
exclusively. 
Charms, it has been suggested, in some cases are prayers that 
by vain repetition have lost their religious significance 
and become mere spells. And similarly it has been sug- 
gested that out of mere spells prayer may have been 
evolved. But, on the hypothesis that a spell is something 
in which no religion is, it is clear that out of it no re- 
ligion can come; while if prayer, i.e. religion, has been 
evolved out of spells, then there have never been spells 
wholly wanting in every religious element. Whether a 
given formula then is prayer or spell may be difficult 
to decide, when it has some features which seem to be 
magical and others which seem to be religious. The 
magical element may have been original and be in 
process of disappearing before the dawn of the religious 
spirit. Now, the formula uttered is usually accom- 
panied by gestures performed. If the words are uttered 
to explain the gesture or rite, the explanation is offered 
to some one, the words are of the nature of a prayer to 
some one to grant the desire which the gesture manifests. 



Xviil ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Pages 
On the other hand, if the gestures are performed to 
make the words more intelligible, then the action per- 
formed is, again, not magical, but is intended to make 
the words — the prayer — more emphatic. In neither 
case, then, is the gesture or rite magical in intent. Dr. 
Frazer's suggestion that it required long ages for man to 
discover that he could not always succeed — even by the 
aid of magic — in getting what he wanted ; and that 
only when he made this discovery did he take to religion 
and prayer, is a suggestion which cannot be maintained 
in view of the fact that savage man is much more at 
the mercy of accidents than is civilised man. The sug- 
gestion, in fact, tells rather against than in favour of 
the view that magic preceded religion, and that spells 
preceded prayer. 

The Australian black fellows might have been expected to 
present us with the spectacle of a people unacquainted 
with prayer. But in point of fact we find amongst them 
both prayers to Byamee and formulae which, though now 
unintelligible even to the natives, may originally have been 
prayers. And generally speaking the presumption is that 
races, who distinctly admit the existence of spirits, pray 
to those spirits, even though their prayers be concealed 
from the white man's observation. Gods are there for the 
purpose of being prayed to. Prayer is the essence of re- 
ligion, as is shown by the fact that gods, when they cease 
to be prayed to, are ignored rather than worshipped. 
Such gods — as in Africa and elsewhere — become little 
more than memories, when they no longer have a circle 
of worshippers to offer prayer and sacrifice to them. 

The highest point reached in the evolution of pre-Christian 
prayer is when the gods, as knowing best what is good, 
are petitioned simply for things good. Our Lord's prayer 
is a revelation which the theory of evolution cannot 
account for or explain. Nor does Horf ding's " antinomy 
of religious feeling" present itself to the Christian soul as 
an antinomy 138-174 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS XIX 



SACRIFICE 

Prayer and sacrifice historically go together, and logically 
are indissoluble. Sacrifice, whether realised in an offer- 
ing dedicated or in a sacrificial meal, is prompted by the 
worshippers' desire to feel that they are at one with the 
spirit worshipped. That desire manifests itself specially 
on certain regularly occurring occasions (harvest, seed 
time, initiation) and also in times of crisis. At harvest 
time the sacrifices or offerings are thank-offerings, as is 
shown by the fact that a formula of thanksgiving is 
employed. Primitive prayer does not consist solely in 
petitions for favours to come; it includes thanksgiving 
for blessings received. Such thanksgivings cannot by 
any possibility be twisted into magic. 

Analogous to these thanksgivings at harvest time is the sol- 
emn eating of first-fruits amongst the Australian black 
fellows. If this solemn eating is not in Australia a 
survival of a sacramental meal, in which the god and his 
worshippers were partakers, it must be merely a ceremony 
whereby the food, which until it is eaten is taboo, is 
" desacralised.' , But, as a matter of fact, such food is not 
taboo to the tribe generally; and the object of the solemn 
eating cannot be to remove the taboo and desacralise the 
food for the tribe. 

If the harvest rites or first-fruit ceremonials are sacrificial in 
nature, then the presumption is that so, too, are the cere- 
monies performed at seed time or the analogous period. 

At initiation ceremonies or mysteries, even amongst the 
Australian black fellows, there is evidence to show that 
prayer is offered; and generally speaking we may say 
that the boy initiated is admitted to the worship of the 
tribal gods. 

The spring and harvest customs are closely allied to one 
another and may be arranged in four groups: (i) In Mex- 
ico they plainly consist of the worship of a god — by 
means of sacrifice and prayer — and of communion. 



XX ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

(2) In some other cases, though the god has no proper or 
personal name, and no image is made of him, "the new 
corn," Dr. Frazer says, "is itself eaten sacramentally, 
that is, as the body of the corn spirit"; and it is by this 
sacramental meal that communion is effected or main- 
tained. (3) In the harvest customs of northern Europe, 
bread and dumplings are made and eaten sacramentally, 
"as a substitute for the real flesh of the divine being"; 
or an animal is slain and its flesh and blood are partaken 
of. (4) Amongst the Australian tribes there is a sacra- 
mental eating of the totem animal or plant. Now, these 
four groups of customs may be all religious (and Dr. 
Frazer speaks of them all as sacramental) or all magical ; 
or it may be admitted that the first three are religious, and 
maintained that the fourth is strictly magical. But such 
a separation of the Australian group from the rest does 
not commend itself as likely; further, it overlooks the 
fact that it is at the period analogous to harvest 
time that the headman eats solemnly and sparingly of 
the plant or animal, and that at harvest time it is too late 
to work magic to cause the plant or animal to grow. 
The probability is, then, that both the Australian group 
and the others are sacrificial rites and are religious. 
Such sacrificial rites, however, though felt to be the means 
whereby communion was effected and maintained be- 
tween the god and his worshippers, may come to be 
interpreted as the making of gifts to the god, as the 
means of purchasing his favour, or as a full discharge 
of their obligations. When so interpreted they will be 
denounced by true religion. But though it be admitted 
that the sacrificial rite might be made to bear this aspect, 
it does not follow, as is sometimes supposed, that it was 
from the outset incapable of bearing any other. On the 
contrary, it was, from the beginning, not only the rite 
of making offerings to the god but, also, the rite whereby 
communion was attained, whereby the society of wor- 
shippers was brought into the presence of the god they 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxi 

Pages 
worshipped, even though the chief benefits which the 
worshippers conceived themselves to receive were earthly 
blessings. It is because the rite had from the beginning 
this potentiality in it that it was possible for it to become 
the means whereby, through Christ, all men might be 
brought to God 175-210 

MORALITY 

The question whether morality is based on religion, or re- 
ligion on morality, is one which calls for discussion, 
inasmuch as it is apt to proceed on a mistaken view 
of facts in the history of religion. It is maintained 
that as a matter of history morality came first and re- 
ligion afterwards; and that as a matter of philosophy 
religion presupposes morality. Reality, that is to say, is 
in the making; the spirit of man is self-realising; being 
is in process of becoming rationalised and moralised; 
religion in process of disappearing. 

Early religion, it is said, is unethical : it has to do with spirits, 
which, as such, are not concerned with morality; with 
gods which are not ethical or ideal, and are not objects 
of worship in our sense of the term. 

Now, the spirits which, in the period of animism, are believed 
to animate things, are not, it is true, concerned with 
morality ; but then, neither are they gods. To be a god 
a spirit must have a community of worshippers; and it is 
as the protector of that community that he is worshipped. 
He protects the community against any individual mem- 
ber who violates the custom of the community. The 
custom of the community constitutes the morality of the 
society. Offences against that custom are offences 
against the god of the community. A god starts as an 
ethical power, and as an object of worship. 

Still, it may be argued, before gods were, before religion 
was evolved, morality was; and this may be shown by 
the origin and nature of justice, which throughout is 
entirely independent of religion and religious considera- 



XX11 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

tions. On this theory, the origin of justice is to be found 
in the resentment of the individual. But, first, the in- 
dividual, apart from society, is an abstraction and an 
impossibility: the individual never exists apart from 
but always as a member of some society. Next, justice 
is not the resentment of any individual, but the senti- 
ment of the community, expressing itself in the action not 
of any individual but of the community as such. The 
responsibility both for the wrong done and for righting it 
rests with the community. The earliest offences against 
which public action is taken are said to be witchcraft and 
breaches of the marriage laws. The latter are not in- 
juries resented by any individual: they are offences 
against the gods and are punished to avert the mis- 
fortunes which otherwise would visit the tribe. Witch- 
craft is especially offensive to the god of the community. 
In almost, if not quite, the lowest stages of human develop- 
ment, disease and famine are regarded as punishments 
which fall on the community as a whole, because the 
community, in the person of one of its members, has 
offended some supernatural power. In quite the lowest 
stage the guilt of the offending member is also regarded 
as capable of infecting the whole community; and he 
is, accordingly, avoided by the whole community and 
tabooed. Taboo is due to the collective action, and ex- 
presses the collective feeling of the community as a 
whole. It is from such collective action and feeling that 
justice has been evolved and not from individual resent- 
ment, which is still and always was something different 
from justice. The offences punished by the community 
have always been considered, so far as they are offences 
against morality, to be offences against the gods of the 
community. The fact that in course of time such offences 
come to be punished always as militating against the 
good of society testifies merely to the general assumption 
that the good of man is the will of God: men do not 
believe that murder, adultery, etc., are merely offences 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS XX111 

Pages 
against man's laws. It is only by ignoring this patent 
fact that it becomes possible to maintain that religion 
is built upon morality, and that we are discovering 
religion to be a superfluous superstructure. 
It may be argued that the assumption that murder, adultery, 
etc., are offences against God's will is a mere assump- 
tion, and that in making the assumption we are fleeing 
"to the bosom of faith." The reply is that we are 
content not merely to flee but to rest there . . 211-238 

CHRISTIANITY 

If we are to understand the place of Christianity in the evo- 
lution of religion, we must consider the place of reli- 
gion in the evolution of humanity ; and I must explain 
the point of view from which I propose to approach the 
three ideas of (1) evolution, (2) the evolution of humanity, 
(3) the evolution of religion. 

I wish to approach the idea of evolution from the proposition 
that the individual is both a means by which society at- 
tains its end, and an end for the sake of which society 
exists. Utilitarianism has familiarised us with the view 
that society exists for the sake of the individual and for 
the purpose of realising the happiness and good of 
every individual: no man is to be treated merely as a 
chattel, existing solely as a means whereby his owner, or 
the governing class, may benefit. But this aspect of the 
facts is entirely ignored by the scientific theory of evo- 
lution: according to that theory, the individual exists 
only as a factor in the process of evolution, as one of the 
means by which, and not as in any sense the end for 
which, the process is carried on. 

Next, this aspect of the facts is ignored not only by the 
scientific theory of evolution, but also by the theory which 
humanitarianism holds as to the evolution of humanity, 
viz. that it is a process moving through the three stages 
of custom, religion, and humanitarianism. That process 
is still, as it has long been in the past, far from complete: 



XXIV ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

the end is not yet. It is an end in which, whenever and 
if ever realised on earth, we who are now living shall not 
live to partake : we are — on this theory of the evolu- 
tion of humanity — means, and solely means, to an end 
which, when realised, we shall not partake in. Being an 
end in which we cannot participate, it is not an end 
which can be rationally set up for us to strive to attain. 
Nor will the generation, which is ultimately to enjoy it, 
find much satisfaction in reflecting that their enjoyment 
has been purchased at the cost of others. To treat a 
minority of individuals as the end for which humanity 
is evolved, and the majority as merely means, is a 
strange pass for humanitarianism to come to. 

Approaching the evolution of religion from the point of view 
that the individual must always be regarded both as an 
end and as a means, we find that Buddhism denies the 
individual to be either the one or the other, for his very 
existence is an illusion, and an illusion which must be 
dispelled, in order that he may cease from an existence 
which it is an illusion to imagine that he possesses. If, 
however, we turn to other religions less highly developed 
than Buddhism, we find that, in all, the existence of the 
individual as well as of the god of the community is 
assumed; that the interests of the community are the 
will of the community's god; that the interests of the 
community are higher than the interests of the individual, 
when they appear to differ; and that the man who prefers 
the interests of the community to his own is regarded as 
the higher type of man. In fine, the individual, from 
this point of view, acts voluntarily as the means whereby 
the end of society may be realised. And, in so acting, he 
testifies to his conviction that he will thereby realise his 
own end. 

Throughout the history of religion these two facts are im- 
plied: first, the existence of the individual as a member 
of society seeking communion with God; next, the ex- 
istence of society as a means of which the individual is 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS XXV 

Pages 
the end. Hence two consequences with regard to evolu- 
tion: first, evolution may have helped to make us, but we 
are helping to make it ; next, the end of evolution is not 
wholly outside any one of us, but in part is realised 
in us. And it is just because the end is both within 
us and without us that we are bound up with our fellow- 
man and God. _ 

Whether the process of evolution is moving to any end what- 
ever, is a question which science declines — formally re- 
fuses — to consider. Whether the end at which religion 
aims is possible or not, has in any degree been achieved 
or not, is a question which the science of religion formally 
declines to consider. If, however, we recognise that the 
end of religion, viz. communion with God, is an end at 
which we ought to aim, then the process whereby the end 
tends to be attained is no longer evolution in the scien- 
tific sense. It is a process in which progress may or may 
not be made. As a fact, the missionary everywhere sees 
arrested development, imperfect communion with God; 
for the different forms of religion realise the end of 
religion in different degrees. Christianity claims to be 
"final," not in the chronological sense, but in that it 
alone finds the true basis and the only end of society in 
the love of God. The Christian theory of society again 
differs from all other theories in that it not only regards 
the individuals composing it as continuing to exist after 
death, but teaches that the society of which the individual 
is truly a member, though it manifests itself in this world, 
is realised in the next. 

The history of religion is the history of man's search for God. 
That search depends for its success, in part, upon man's 
will. Christianity cannot be stationary: the extent to 
which we push our missionary outposts forward gives 
us the measure of our vitality. And in that respect, as 
in others, the vitality of the United States is great. 239-265 

APPENDIX 266 ad fin. 



INTRODUCTION 

Of the many things that fill a visitor from the 
old country with admiration, on his first visit to 
the United States, that which arrests his attention 
most frequently, is the extent and success with 
which science is applied to practical purposes. And 
it is beginning to dawn upon me that in the 
United States it is not only pure science which is 
thus practically applied, — the pure sciences of 
mechanics, physics, mathematics, — but that the 
historic sciences also are expected to justify them- 
selves by their practical application; and that 
amongst the historic sciences not even the science 
of religion is exempted from the common lot. 
It also may be useful ; and had better be so, — 
if any one is to have any use for it. It must make 
itself useful to the man who has practical need of 
its results and wishes to apply them — the mis- 
sionary. He it is who, for the practical purposes 
of the work to which he is called, requires an 
applied science of religion; and Hartford Theo- 



2 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

logical Seminary may, I believe, justly claim to 
be the first institution in the world which has 
deliberately and consciously set to work to create 
by the courses of lectures, of which this series is 
the very humble beginning, an applied science of 
religion. 

How, then, will the applied science differ from 
the pure science of religion? In one way it will 
not differ: an applied science does not sit in judg- 
ment upon the pure science on which it is based ; 
it accepts the truths which the pure science pre- 
sents to all the world, and bases itself upon them. 
/The business of pure science is to discover facts;.^ 
that of the applied science is to use theny- The 
business of the science of religion is to discover 
all the facts necessary if we are to understand the 
growth and history of religion. The business of 
the applied science is, in our case, to use the dis- 
covered facts as a means of showing that Chris- 
tianity is the highest manifestation of the religious 
spirtyl 

In dealing with the applied science, then, we 
recover a liberty which the pure science does not 
enjoy. The science of religion is a historic 
science. Its student looks back upon the past; 



INTRODUCTION 3 

and looks back upon it with a single purpose, that 
of discovering what, as a matter of fact, did happen, 
what was the order in which the events occurred. 
In so looking back he may, and does, see many 
things which he could wish had not occurred ; but 
he has no power to alter them; he has no choice 
but to record them; and his duty, his single duty, 
is to ascertain the historic facts and to establish 
the historic truth. With the applied science the 
case is very different. There the student sets his 
face to the future, no longer to the past. The 
truths of pure science are the weapons placed in 
his hand with which he is to conquer the world. 
It is in the faith that the armour provided him by 
science is sure and will not fail him that he addresses 
himself to his chosen work. The implements are 
set in his hands. The liberty is his to employ 
them for what end he will. That liberty is a con- 
sequence of the fact that the student's object no 
longer is to ascertain the past, but to make the 
future. 

The business of the pure science is to ascertain 
the facts and state the truth. To what use the 
facts and truth are afterwards put, is a question 
with which the pure science has nothing to do. 



4 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

The same facts maybe put to very different uses: 
from the same facts very different conclusions may 
be drawn. The facts which the science of reli- 
gion establishes may be used and are used for 
different and for contradictory purposes. The man 
who is agnostic or atheist uses them to support his 
atheism or agnosticism; or even, if he is so un- 
wise, to prove it. The man who has religion is 
equally at liberty to use them in his support; and 
if he rarely does that, at any rate he still more rarely 
commits the mistake of imagining that the science 
of religion proves the truth of his particular views 
on the subject of religion. Indeed, his tendency is 
rather in the opposite direction : he is unreasonably 
uneasy and apt to have a disquieting alarm lest 
the science of religion may really be a danger to 
religion. This alarm may very naturally arise 
when he discovers that to the scientific student one 
religion is as another, and the question is indiffer- 
ent whether there is any truth in any form. It is 
very easy to jump from these facts to the erroneous 
conclusion that science of religion is wholly in- 
compatible with religious belief. And of course it 
is quite human and perfectly intelligible that that 
conclusion should be proclaimed aloud as correct 



INTRODUCTION 5 

and inevitable by the man who, being an atheist, 
fights for what he feels to be the truth. 

We must, therefore, once more insist upon the 
simple fact that science of religion abstains neces- 
sarily from assuming either that religion is true or 
is not true. What it does assume is what no one 
will deny, viz. that religion is a fact. Religious 
beliefs may be right or they may be wrong: but 
they exist. Therefore they can be studied, de- 
scribed, classified, placed in order of development, 
and treated as a branch of sociology and as one 
department of the evolution of the world. And 
all this can be done without once asking the ques- 
tion whether religious belief is true and right and 
good, or not. Whether it is pronounced true or 
false by you or me, will not in the least shake the 
fact that it has existed for thousands of years, that 
it has had a history during that period, and that 
that history may be written. We may have 
doubts whether the institution of private property 
is a good thing, or whether barter and exchange 
are desirable proceedings. But we shall not doubt 
that private property exists or that it may be ex- 
changed. And we shall not imagine that the science 
of political economy, which deals, among other 



6 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

things with the production and exchange of wealth 
which is private property, makes any pronounce- 
ment whatever on the question whether private 
property is or is not an institution which we ought to 
support and believe in. The conclusions established 
by the science of political economy are set forth be- 
fore the whole world ; and men may use them for what 
purpose they will. They may and do draw very 
different inferences from them, even contradictory 
inferences. But if they do, it is because they use 
them for different ends or contradictory purposes. 
And the fact that the communist or socialist uses 
political economy to support his views no more 
proves that socialism is the logical consequence of 
political economy than the fact that the atheist 
uses or misuses, for his own purposes, the conclu- 
sions of the science of religion proves his inferences 
to be the logical outcome of the science. 

The science of religion deals essentially with the 
one fact that religion has existed and does exist. 
It is from that fact that the missionary will start; 
and it is with men who do not question the fact 
that he will have to do. The science of religion 
seeks to trace the historic growth, the evolution of 
religion; to establish what actually was, not to 



INTRODUCTION 7 

judge what ought to have been, — science knows 
no " ought," in that sense or rather in that tense, 
the past tense. Its work is done, its last word has 
been said, when it has demonstrated what was. 
It is the heart which sighs to think what might have 
been, and which puts on it a higher value than it 
does on what actually came to pass. There is 
then another order in which facts may be ranged 
besides the chronological order in which histori- 
cally they occurred; and that is the order of their 
value. It is an order in which we do range facts, when- 
ever we criticise them. It is the order in which we 
range them, whenever we pass judgment on them. 
Or, rather, passing judgment on them is placing them 
in the order of their value. And the chronological 
order of their occurrence is quite a different thing 
from the order in which we rank them when we 
judge them according to their value and importance. 
It is, or rather it would be, quite absurd to say, in 
the case of literature, or art, for instance, that the 
two orders are identical. There it is obvious and 
universally admitted that one period may reach a 
higher level than another which in point of time is 
later. The classical period is followed by a post- 
classical period ; culmination is followed by decline. 



8 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Now, this difference in point of the literary or 
artistic value of two periods is as real and as funda- 
mental as the time order or chronological relation 
of the two periods. It would be patently ridiculous 
for any ardent maintainer of the importance of dis- 
tinguishing between good literature and bad, good 
art and bad art, to say that the one period, being 
good, must have been chronologically prior to the 
other, because, from the point of art, it was better 
than that other. Every one can see that. The 
chronological order, the historic order, is one thing; 
the order of literary value or artistic importance is 
another. But if this is granted, and every one will 
grant it, then it is also, and thereby, granted that 
the historic order of events is not the same thing 
as the order of their value, and is no guide to it. 
Thus far I have illustrated these remarks by 
reference to literary and artistic values. But I 
need hardly say that I have been thinking really all 
the time of religious values. If the student of 
literature or of art, surveys the history of art and 
literature with the purpose of judging the value of 
the works produced, the student of religion may 
and must survey the history of religion with the 
same purpose. If the one student is entitled, as he 



INTRODUCTION 9 

justly is entitled, to say that the difference between 
the literary or artistic value of two periods is as real 
and as fundamental as is their difference in the 
order of time, then the student of religion is claim- 
ing no exceptional or suspicious privilege for him- 
self. He is claiming no privilege at all ; he is but 
exercising the common rights of all students like 
himself, when he points out that differences in 
religious values are just as real and just as funda- 
mental as the historic or chronological order itself. 

The assignment of values, then, — be it the assign- 
ment of the value of works of art, literature, or 
religion, — is a proceeding which is not only possible 
(as will be somewhat contemptuously admitted by 
those who believe that evolution is progress, and that 
there is no order of value distinct from the order of 
history and chronological succession) ; the assign- 
ment of value is not only permissible (as may be 
admitted by those who believe, or for want of 
thought fancy they believe, that the historic order 
of events is the only order which can really exist), 
it is absolutely inevitable. It is the concomitant or 
rather an integral part of every act of perception. 
Everything that we perceive is either dismissed from 
attention because it is judged at the moment to have 



IO COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

no value, or, if it has value, attention is concen- 
trated upon it. 

From this point of view, then, it should be clear 
that there is some deficiency in such a science as the 
science of religion, which, by the very conditions 
that determine its existence, is precluded from ever 
raising the question of the value of any of the 
religions with which it deals. Why does it volun- 
tarily, deliberately, and of its own accord, rigidly 
exclude the question whether religions have any 
value — whether religion itself has any value ? 
One answer there is to that question which once 
would have been accepted as conclusive, viz. that 
the object of science is truth. That answer deli- 
cately implies that whether religion has any value is 
an enquiry to which no truthful answer can be given. 
The object of science is truth; therefore science 
alone, with all modesty be it said, can attain truth. 
Science will not ask the question — or, when it is 
merciful, abstains from asking the question — 
whether religion is true. So the reasonable and 
truthful man must, on that point, necessarily be ag- 
nostic : whether religion is true, he does not know. 

This train of inferences follows — so far as it is 
permitted illogical inferences to follow at all — from 



INTRODUCTION II 

the premise that the object of science is truth. Or, 
rather, it follows from that premise as we should now 
understand it, viz. that the object of historic science 
is historic truth. That is the object of the science 
of religion — to be true to the historic facts, to 
discover and to state them accurately. On the 
principle of the division of labour, or on the principle 
of taking one thing at a time, it is obviously wise 
that when we are endeavouring to discover the his- 
toric sequence of events, we should confine our- 
selves to that task and not suffer ourselves to be 
distracted and diverted by other and totally differ- 
ent considerations. The science of religion, there- 
fore, is justified, in the opinion of all who are en- 
titled to express an opinion, in steadfastly declining 
to consider any other point than the historic order 
of the facts with which it deals. But in so declining 
to go beyond its self-appointed task of reconstituting 
the historic order of events and tracing the evolu- 
tion of religion, it does not, thereby, imply that it is 
impossible to place them, or correctly place them, 
in their order of value. To say that they have no 
value would be just as absurd as to say that works 
of literature or art have no literary or artistic value. 
To say that it is difficult to assign their value may be 



12 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

true, but is no argument against, it is rather a stimu- 
lus in favour of, making the attempt. And it is just 
the order value, the relative value, of forms of religion 
which is of absorbing interest to missionaries. It 
is a valuation which is essential to what I have 
already designated as the applied science of religion. 
Thus far in speaking of the distinction between 
the historic order in which the various forms of art, 
literature, and religion have occurred, and the order 
of value in which the soul of every man who is sen- 
sible either to art or to literature or to religion 
instinctively attempts to place them, I have neces- 
sarily assumed the position of one who looks back- 
ward over the past. It was impossible to compare 
and contrast the order value with the historic order, 
save by doing so. It was necessary to point out 
that the very same facts which can be arranged chro- 
nologically and in the order of their evolution can 
also be — and, as a matter of fact, by every man are 
— arranged more or less roughly, more or less cor- 
rectly, or incorrectly, in the order of their value. It 
is now necessary for us to set our faces towards the 
future. I say " necessary" for the simple reason 
that the idea of " value" carries with it a reference 
to the future. If a thing has value, it is because we 



INTRODUCTION 1 3 

judge that it may produce some effect and serve 
some purpose which we foresee, or at least surmise. 
If, on looking back upon past history, we pronounce 
that an event had value, we do so because we see 
that it served, or might have served, some end of 
which we approve. Its value is relative in our eyes 
to some end or purpose which was relatively future 
to it. The objects which we aim at, the ends after 
which we strive, are in the future. Those things 
have value which may subserve our ends and help 
us to attain our purposes. And our purposes, our 
ends, and objects are in the future. There, there is 
hope and freedom, room to work, the chance of 
remedying the errors of the past, the opportunity to 
make some forward strides and to help others on. 

It is the end we aim at, the object we strive for, 
the ideal we set before us, that gives value to what 
we do, and to what has been done by us and others. 
Now our ends, our objects, and our ideals are matters 
of the will, on which the will is set, and not merely 
matters of which we have intellectual apprehension. 
They are not past events but future possibilities. 
The conviction that we can attain them or attain 
toward them is not, when stated as a proposition, 
a proposition that can be proved, as a statement 



14 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

referring to the past may be proved : but it is a 
conviction which we hold, or a conviction which 
holds us, just as strongly as any conviction that we 
have about any past event of history. The whole 
action of mankind, every action that every man 
performs, is based upon that conviction. It is the 
basis of all that we do, of everything that is and has 
been done by us and others. And it is Faith. In 
that sign alone can the world be conquered. 

When, then, the man of religion proposes by faith 
to conquer the world, he is simply doing, wittingly 
and in full consciousness of what he is doing, that 
which every man does in his every action, even though 
he may not know it. To make it a sneer or a re- 
proach that religion is a mere matter of faith; to 
imagine that there is any better, or indeed that there 
is any other, ground of action, — is demonstrably 
unreasonable. The basis of such notions is, of 
course, the false idea that the man of sense acts upon 
knowledge, and that the man who acts on faith is 
not a sensible man. The error of such notions may 
be exposed in a sentence. What knowledge have 
we of the future? We have none. Absolutely 
none. We expect that nature will prove uniform, 
that causes will produce their effects. We believe 



INTRODUCTION 1 5 

the future will resemble, to some extent, the past. 
But we have no knowledge of the future ; and such 
belief as we have about it, like all other belief, — 
whether it be belief in religion or in science, — is 
simply faith. When, then, the man of science con- 
sults the records of the past or the experiments of 
the present for guidance as to what will or may be, 
he is exhibiting his faith not in science, but in some 
reality, in some real being, in which is no shadow of 
turning. When the practical man uses the results 
of pure science for some practical end, he is taking 
them on faith and uses them in the further faith 
that the end he aims at can be realised, and shall 
by him be realised, if not in one way, then in another. 
The missionary, then, who uses the results of the 
science of religion, who seeks to benefit by an 
applied science of religion, is but following in the 
footsteps of the practical man, and using business 
methods toward the end he is going to realise. 

The end he is going to realise is to convert men to 
Christianity. The faith in which he acts is that 
Christianity is the highest form which religion can 
take, the final form it shall take. As works of art 
or literature may be classed either according to order 
of history or order of value, so the works of the 



1 6 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

religious spirit may be classed, not only in chrono- 
logical order, but also in order of religious value. I 
am not aware that any proof can be given to show 
that any given period of art or literature is better 
than any other. The merits of Shakespeare or of 
Homer may be pointed out ; and they may, or they 
may not, when pointed out, be felt. If they are felt, 
no proof is needed ; if they are not, no proof is pos- 
sible. But they can be pointed out — by one who 
feels them. And they can be contrasted with the 
work of other poets in which they are less conspicu- 
ous. And the contrast may reveal the truth in a 
way in which otherwise it could never have been 
made plain. 

I know no other way in which the relative values 
of different forms of religion can become known or 
be made known. You may have been tempted to 
reflect, whilst I have been speaking, that, on the 
principle I have laid down, there is no reason why 
there should not be five hundred applied sciences, 
or applications of the science, of religion, instead 
of one ; for every one of the many forms of religion 
may claim to apply the science of religion to its 
own ends. To that I may reply first, that a priori 
you would expect that every nation would set up 



INTRODUCTION 1 7 

its own literature as the highest ; but, as a matter of 
fact, you find Shakespeare generally placed highest 
amongst dramatists, Homer amongst epic poets. 
You do not find the conception of literary merit 
varying from nation to nation in such a way that 
there are as many standards of value as there are 
persons to apply them. You find that there tends 
to be one standard. Next, since the different forms 
of religion must be compared if their relative values 
are to be ascertained, the method of the applied 
science of religion must be the method of com- 
parison. Whatever the outcome that is anticipated 
from the employment of the applied science, it is 
by the method of comparison that it must act. And 
one indication of genuine faith is readiness to em- 
ploy that method, and assured confidence in the 
result of its employment. The missionary's life is 
the best, because the most concrete example of the 
practical working of the method of comparison; 
and the outcome of the comparison which is made 
by those amongst whom and for whom he works 
makes itself felt in their hearts, their lives, and some- 
times in their conversion. It is the best example, 
because the value of a religion to be known must be 
felt. But though it is the best because it is the 



1 8 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

simplest, the most direct, and the most convincing, 
it is not that which addresses itself primarily to the 
reason, and it is not one which is produced by the 
applied science of religion. It is not one which 
can be produced by any science, pure or applied. 
The object of the applied science of religion is to 
enable the missionary himself to compare forms of 
religion, incidentally in order that he may know 
what by faith he feels, and without faith he could 
not feel, viz. that Christianity is the highest form; 
but still more in order that he may teach others, and 
may have at his command the facts afforded by the 
science of religion, wherewith to appeal, when 
necessary, to the reason and intelligence as well as 
to the hearts and feelings of those for whose salva- 
tion he is labouring. 

The time has happily gone by when the mere 
idea of comparing Christianity with any other 
religion would have been rejected with horror as 
treasonous and treacherous. The fact that that 
time has now gone by is in itself evidence of a 
stronger faith in Christianity. What, if it was not 
fear, at any rate presented the appearance of fear, 
has been banished ; and we can and do, in the greater 
faith that has been vouchsafed to us, look with con- 



INTRODUCTION 1 9 

fidence on the proposal to compare Christianity 
with other religions. The truth cannot but gain 
thereby, and we rest on Him who is the way and 
the truth. We recognise fully and freely that com- 
parison implies similarity, points of resemblance, 
ay ! and even features of identity. And of that 
admission much has been made — and more than 
can be maintained. It has been pressed to mean 
that all forms of religion, from the lowest to the 
highest, are identical; that therefore there is noth- 
ing more or other in the highest than in the lowest ; 
and that in the lowest you see how barbarous is 
religion and how unworthy of civilised man. Now, 
that course of argument is open to one obvious ob- 
jection which would be fatal to it, even if it were the 
only objection, which it is not. That objection is 
that whether we are using the method of compari- 
son for the purpose of estimating the relative values 
of different forms of religion; or whether we are 
using the comparative method of science, with the 
object of discovering and establishing facts, quite 
apart from the value they may have for any pur- 
pose they may be put to when they have been 
established; in either case, comparison is only 
applied, and can only be applied to things which, 



20 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

though they resemble one another, also differ from 
one another. It is because they differ, at first sight, 
that the discovery of their resemblance is impor- 
tant. And it is on that aspect of the truth that the 
comparative method of science dwells. Com- 
parative philology, for instance, devotes itself to 
establishing resemblances between, say, the Indo- 
European languages, which for long were not sus- 
pected to bear any likeness to one another or to have 
any connection with each other. Those resem- 
blances are examined more and more closely, are 
stated with more and more precision, until they are 
stated as laws of comparative philology, and recog- 
nised as laws of science to which there are no excep- 
tions. Yet when the resemblances have been 
worked out to the furthest detail, no one imagines 
that Greek and Sanskrit are the same language, or 
that the differences between them are negligible. It 
is then surprising that any student of comparative 
religion should imagine that the discovery or the 
recognition of points of likeness between the reli- 
gions compared will ever result in proving that the 
differences between them are negligible or non- 
existent. Such an inference is unscientific, and 
it has only to be stated to show that the student 



INTRODUCTION 21 

of comparative religion is but exercising a right 
common to all students of all sciences, when he 
claims that points of difference cannot be over- 
looked or thrust aside. 

If, then, the student of the science of religion 
directs his attention primarily to the discovery of 
resemblances between religions which at first sight 
bear no more resemblance to one another than 
Greek did to the Celtic tongues; if the compara- 
tive method of science dwells upon the fact that 
things which differ from one another may also re- 
semble one another, and that their resemblances may 
be stated in the form of scientific laws, — there is 
still another aspect of the truth, and it is that between 
things which resemble one another there are also 
differences. And the jury of the world will ulti- 
mately demand to know the truth and the whole 
truth. 

Now, to get not only at the truth, but at the whole 
of the truth, is precisely the business of the applied 
science of religion, and is the very object of that 
which, in order to distinguish it from the compara- 
tive method of science, I have called the method 
of comparison. For the purposes of fair compari- 
son not only must the resemblances, which the 



22 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

comparative method of science dwells on, be 
taken into account, but the differences, also, must be 
weighed. And it is the business of the method of 
comparison, the object of the applied science of 
religion, to do both things. Neither of the two can 
be dispensed with; neither is more important than 
the other; but for the practical purposes of the 
missionary it is important to begin with the resem- 
blances ; and on grounds of logic and of theory, the 
resemblances must be first established, if the im- 
portance, nay ! the decisive value, of the differences 
is to go home to the hearts and minds of the mis- 
sionary's hearers. The resemblances are there and 
are to be studied ultimately in order to bring out 
the differences and make them stand forth so plainly 
as to make choice between the higher form of reli- 
gion and the lower easy, simply because the differ- 
ence is so manifest. Now, the missionary's hearer 
could not know, much less appreciate, the difference, 
the superiority of Christianity, as long as Chris- 
tianity was unknown to him. And it is equally 
manifest, though it has never been officially recog- 
nised until now and by the Hartford Theological 
Seminary, that neither can the missionary ade- 
quately set forth the superiority of Christianity to 



INTRODUCTION 23 

the lower forms of religion, unless he knows some- 
thing about them and about the points in which their 
inferiority consists. Hitherto he has had to learn 
that for himself, as he went on, and, as it were, by 
rule of thumb. But, on business principles, economy 
of labour and efficiency in work will be better se- 
cured if he is taught before he goes out, and is 
taught on scientific methods. What he has to 
learn is the resemblances between the various forms 
of religion, the differences between them, and the 
relative values of those differences. 

It may perhaps be asked, Why should those dif- 
ferences exist ? And if the question should be put, 
I am inclined to say that to give the answer is beyond 
the scope of the applied science of religion. The 
method of comparison assumes that the differences 
do exist, and it cannot begin to be employed unless 
and until they exist. They are and must be taken 
for granted, at any rate by the applied science of 
religion, and if the method of comparison is to be 
set to work. Indeed, if we may take the principle 
of evolution to be the differentiation of the homo- 
geneous, we may go further and say that the whole 
theory of evolution, and not merely a particular 
historic science, such as the science of religion, 



24 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

postulates differentiation and the principle of differ- 
ence, and does not explain it, — evolution cannot 
start, the homogeneous cannot be other than homo- 
geneous, until the principle of difference and the 
power of differentiation is assumed. 

That the science of religion at the end leaves 
untouched those differences between religions which 
it recognised at the beginning, is a point on which I 
insisted, as against those who unwarrantably pro- 
claim the science to have demonstrated that all 
religions alike are barbarisms or survivals of bar- 
barism. It is well, therefore, to bear that fact in mind 
when attempts are made to explain the existence of 
the differences by postulating a period when they 
were non-existent. That postulate may take form 
in the supposition that originally the true religion 
alone existed, and that the differences arose later. 
That is a supposition which has been made by more 
than one people, and in more ages than one. It 
carries with it the consequence that the history — ■ 
it would be difficult to call it the evolution and 
impossible to call it the progress — of religion has 
been one of degradation generally. Owing, however, 
to the far-reaching and deep-penetrating influence 
of the theory of evolution, it has of late grown cus- 



INTRODUCTION 25 

tomary to assume that the movement, the course of 
religious history, has been in the opposite direction ; 
and that it has moved upwards from the lowest forms 
of religion known to us, or from some form analogous 
to the lowest known forms, through the higher to 
the highest. This second theory, however different 
in its arrangement of the facts from the Golden Age 
theory first alluded to, is still fundamentally in 
agreement with it, inasmuch as it also assumes that 
the differences exhibited later in the history of 
religion at first were non-existent. Both theories 
assume the existence of the originally homogeneous, 
but they disagree as to the nature of the differences 
which supervened, and also as to the nature of the 
originally homogeneous. 

I wish therefore to call attention to the simple 
truth that the facts at the disposal of the science of 
religion neither enable nor warrant us to decide 
between these two views. If we were to come to a 
decision on the point, we should have to travel far 
beyond the confines of the science of religion, or 
the widest bounds of the theory of evolution, and 
enquire why there should be error as well as truth — 
or, to put the matter very differently, why there 
should be truth at all. But if we started travelling 



26 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

on that enquiry, we should not get back in time for 
this course of lectures. Fortunately it is not neces- 
sary to take a ticket for that journey — perhaps not 
possible to secure a return ticket. We have only 
to recognise that the science of religion confines 
itself to constating and tracing the differences, and 
does not attempt to explain why they should exist; 
while the applied science of religion is concerned 
with the practical business of bringing home the 
difference between Christianity and other forms of 
religion to the hearts of those whose salvation may 
turn on whether the missionary has been properly 
equipped for his task. 

If, now, I announce that for the student of the 
applied science it is advisable that he should turn 
his attention in the first place to the lowest forms of 
religion, the announcement need not be taken to 
mean that a man cannot become a student of the 
science of religion, whether pure or applied, unless 
he assumes that the lowest is the most primitive 
form. The science of religion, as it pushes its 
enquiries, may possibly come across — may even 
already have come across — the lowest form to 
which it is possible for man to descend. But 
whether that form is the most primitive as well as 



INTRODUCTION 27 

the lowest, — still more, whether it is the most 
primitive because it is the lowest, — will be ques- 
tions which will not admit of being settled offhand. 
And in the meantime we are not called upon to 
answer them in the affirmative as a sine qua non of 
being admitted students of the science. 

The reason for beginning with the lowest forms is 
— as is proper in a practical science — a practical 
one. As I have already said, if the missionary is to 
succeed in his work, he must know and teach the 
difference and the value of the difference between 
Christianity and other religions. But difference 
implies similarity : we cannot specify the points of 
difference between two things without presupposing 
some similarity between them, — at any rate suffi- 
cient similarity to make a comparison of them profit- 
able. Now, the similarity between the higher forms 
of religion is such that there is no need to demon- 
strate it, in order to justify our proceeding to dwell 
upon the differences. But the similarity between the 
higher and the lower forms is far from being thus 
obvious. Indeed, in some cases, for example in the 
case of some Australian tribes, there is alleged, by 
some students of the science of religion, to be such 
a total absence of similarity that we are entitled or 



28 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

compelled to recognise that however liberally, or 
loosely, we relax our definition of religion, we must 
pronounce those tribes to be without religion. The 
allegation thus made, the question thus raised, 
evidently is of practical importance for the practical 
purposes of the missionary. Where some resem- 
blances exist between the higher and the lower 
forms of religion, those resemblances may be made, 
and should be made, the ground from which the mis- 
sionary should proceed to point out by contrast the 
differences, and so to set forth the higher value of 
Christianity. But if no such resemblances should 
exist, they cannot be made a basis for the mission- 
ary's work. Without proceeding in this introduc- 
tory lecture to discuss the question whether there are 
any tribes whatever that are without religion, I may 
point out that religion, in all its forms, is, in one of 
its aspects, a yearning and aspiration after God, a 
search after Him, peradventure we may find Him. 
And if it be alleged that in some cases there is no 
search after Him, — that amongst civilised men, 
amongst our own acquaintances, there is in some 
cases no search and no aspiration, and that therefore 
among the more backward peoples of the earth 
there may also be tribes to whom the very idea of 



INTRODUCTION 29 

such a search is unknown, — then we must bear in 
mind that a search, after any object whatever, may 
be dropped, may even be totally abandoned; and 
yet the heart may yearn after that which it is per- 
suaded — or, it may be, is deluded into thinking — 
it can never find. Perhaps, however, that way of 
putting it may be objected to, on the ground that it 
is a petitio principii and assumes the very fact it 
is necessary to prove, viz. that the lowest tribes that 
are or can be known to us have made the search 
and given it up, whereas the contention is that they 
have never made the search. That contention, I 
will remark in passing, is one which never can be 
proved. But to those who consider that it is prob- 
able in itself, and that it is a necessary stage in the 
evolution of belief, I would point out that every 
search is made in hope — or, it may be, in fear — 
that search presupposes hope and fear. Vague, of 
course, the hope may be; scarce conscious, if con- 
scious at all, of what is hoped. But without hope, 
until there are some dim stirrings, however vague, 
search is unconceivable, and it is in and by the pro- 
cess of search that the hope becomes stronger and 
the object sought more definite to view. Now, 
inasmuch as it is doubtful whether any tribe of 



30 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

people is without religion, it may reasonably be 
held that the vast majority, at any rate, of the peoples 
of the earth have proceeded from hope to aspiration 
and to search ; and if there should be found a tribe 
which had not yet entered consciously on the search, 
the reasonable conclusion would be not that it is 
exempted from the laws which we see exemplified 
in all other peoples, but that it is tending to obey 
the same laws and is starting from the same point 
as they, — that hope which is the desire of all na- 
tions and has been made manifest in the Son of 
Man. 

Whatever be the earliest history of that hope, 
whatever was its nature and course in prehistoric 
times, it has been worked out in history in many 
directions, under the influence of many errors, into 
many forms of religion. But in them all we feel 
that there is the same striving, the same yearning; 
and we see it with the same pity and distress as we 
may observe the distorted motions of the man who, 
though partially paralysed, yet strives to walk, and 
move to the place where he would be. It is with 
these attempts to walk, in the hope of giving help to 
them who need it, that we who are here to-day are 
concerned. We must study them, if we are to 



INTRODUCTION 3 1 

understand them and to remedy them. And there 
is no understanding them, unless we recognise that 
in them all there is the striving and yearning after 
God, which may be cruelly distorted, but is always 
there. 

It so happens that there has been great readiness 
on the part of students of the science of religion to 
recognise that belief in the continued existence of 
the soul after the death of the body has compara- 
tive universality amongst the lower races of man- 
kind. Their yearning after continued existence 
developes into hope of a future life ; and the hope, 
or fear, takes many forms : the continued existence 
may or may not be on this earth; it may or may 
not take the shape of a belief in the transmigration 
of souls ; it sometimes does, and sometimes does not, 
lead to belief in the judgment of the dead and 
future punishments and rewards; it may or may 
not postulate the immortality of the soul; it may 
shrink to comparative, if not absolute, unimpor- 
tance; or it may be dreaded and denounced by 
philosophy and even by religion. But whether 
dreaded or delighted in, whether developed by re- 
ligion or denounced, the tendency to the belief is 
there — universal among mankind and ineradicable. 



32 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

The parallel, then, between this belief and the 
belief or tendency to believe in God is close and in- 
structive ; and I shall devote my next lecture there- 
fore to the belief in a future life among the primi- 
tive races of mankind. That belief manifests 
itself, as I shall hope to show, from the beginning, in 
a yearning hope for the continued existence of the 
beloved ones who have been taken from us by death, 
as well as in dread of the ghosts of those who during 
their life were feared. But in either case what it 
postulates and points to is man living in community 
with man. It implies society; and there again is 
parallel to religion. It is with the hopes and fears 
of the community as such that religion has to do: 
and it is from that point of view that I shall start 
when I come to deal with the subject of magic, 
and its resemblance to and difference from religion. 
Its resemblance is not accidental and the difference 
is not arbitrary: the difference is that between 
social and anti-social purposes. That difference, 
if borne in mind, may give us the clue to the real 
nature of fetichism, — a subject which will re- 
quire a lecture to itself. I shall then proceed to a 
topic which has been ignored to a surprising extent 
by the science of religion; that is, the subject of 



INTRODUCTION 33 

prayer : and the light which is to be derived thence 
will, I trust, give fresh illumination to the meaning 
of sacrifice. The relation of religion to morality 
will then fall to be considered ; and my final lecture 
will deal with the place of Christianity in the evo- 
lution of religion. 



IMMORTALITY 

The missionary, like any other practical man, 
requires to know what science can teach him about 
the material on which he has to work. So far as is 
possible, he should know what materials are sound 
and can be used with safety in his constructive work, 
and what must be thrown aside, what must be 
destroyed, if his work is to escape dry-rot and to 
stand as a permanent edifice. He should be able to 
feel confidence, for instance, not merely that magic 
and fetichism are the negation of religion, but that 
in teaching that fact he has to support him the 
evidence collected by the science of religion; and 
he should have that evidence placed at his disposal 
for effective use, if need be. 

It may be also that amongst much unsound ma- 
terial he will find some that is sound, that may be 
used, and that he cannot afford to cast away. He 
has to work upon our common humanity, upon the 
humanity common to him and his hearers. He 
has to remember that no man and no community of 

34 



IMMORTALITY 35 

men ever is or has been or ever can be excluded 
from the search after God. And his duty, his 
chosen duty, is to help them in that search, and as 
far as may be to make the way clear for them, and 
to guide their feet in the right path. He will find 
that they have attempted to make paths for them- 
selves ; and it is not impossible that he will find that 
some of those paths for some distance do go in the 
right direction; that some of their beliefs have in 
them an element of truth, or a groping after truth 
which, rightly understood, may be made to lead to 
Christianity. It is with one of those beliefs — the 
belief in immortality — that I shall deal in this 
lecture. 

It is a fact worthy of notice that the belief in im- 
mortality fills, I will not say a more important, but 
a more prominent, place in the hearts and hopes of 
uncivilised than of civilised man; and it is also a 
fact worthy of notice that among primitive men the 
belief in immortality is much less intimately bound 
up with religion than it comes to be at a later period 
of evolution. The two facts are probably not wholly 
without relation to one another. So long as the 
belief in immortality luxuriates and grows wild, so 
to speak, untrained and unrestrained by religion, it 



36 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

developes as the fancy wills, and lives by flattering the - 
fancy. When, however, the relations of a future life 
to morality and religion come to be realised, when 
the conception of the next world comes to be moral- 
ised, then it becomes the subject of fear as well as 
of hope; and the fancy loses much of the freedom 
with which it tricked out the pictures that once it 
drew, purely according to its own sweet liking, of a 
future state. On the one hand, the guilty mind 
prefers not to dwell upon the day of reckoning, so 
long as it can stave off the idea; and it may suc- 
ceed more or less in putting it on one side until 
the proximity of death makes the idea insistent. 
Thus the mind more or less deliberately dismisses 
the future life from attention. On the other hand, 
religion itself insists persistently on the fact that you 
have your duty here and now in this world to per- 
form, and that the rest, the future consequences, 
you must leave to God. Thus, once more, and this 
time not from unworthy motives, attention is di- 
rected to this life rather than to the next ; and it is 
this point that is critical for the fate both of the 
belief in immortality and of religion itself. At this 
point, religion may, as in the case of Buddhism it 
actually has done, formally give up and disavow 



IMMORTALITY 37 

belief in immortality. And in that case it sows the 
seed of its own destruction. Or it may recognise 
that the immortality of the soul is postulated by and 
essential to morality and religion alike. And in that 
case, even in that case alone, is religion in a position 
to provide a logical basis for morality and to place 
the natural desire for a future life on a firmer basis 
than the untutored fancy of primitive man could 
find for it. 

It is then with primitive man or with the lower 
races that we will begin, and with "the comparative 
universality of their belief in the continued existence 
of the soul after the death of the body" (Tylor, 
Primitive Culture, II, i). Now, the classical theory 
of this belief is that set forth by Professor Tylor 
in his Primitive Culture. Whence does primitive 
man get his idea that the soul continues to exist 
after the death of the body ? the answer given is, in 
the first place, from the fact that man dreams. He 
dreams of distant scenes that he visits in his sleep ; 
it is clear, from the evidence of those who saw his 
sleeping body, that his body certainly did not travel ; 
therefore he or his soul must be separable from the 
body and must have travelled whilst his body lay 
unmoving and unmoved. But he also dreams of 



38 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

those who are now dead, and whose bodies he knows, 
it may be, to have been incinerated. The explana- 
tion then is obvious that they, too, or their souls, are 
separable from their bodies ; and the fact that they 
survive death and the destruction of the body is 
demonstrated by their appearance in his dreams. 
About the reality of their appearance in his dreams 
he has no more doubt than he has about the reality of 
what he himself does and suffers in his dreams. If, 
however, the dead appeared only in his dreams, their 
existence after death might seem to be limited to 
the dream-time. But as a matter of fact they ap- 
pear to him in his waking moments also : ghosts are 
at least as familiar to the savage as to the civilised 
man ; and thus the evidence of his dreams, which 
first suggested his belief, is confirmed by the evidence 
of his senses. 

Thus the belief in the continued existence of the 
soul after the death of the body is traced back to 
the action of dreams and waking hallucinations. 
Now, it is inevitable that the inference should be 
drawn that the belief in immortality has thus been 
tracked to its basis. And it is inevitable that those 
who start with an inclination to regard the belief as 
palpably absurd should welcome this exhibition of 



IMMORTALITY 39 

its evolution as proof conclusive that the belief 
could only have originated in and can only impose 
upon immature minds. To that doubtless it is a 
perfectly sound reply to say that the origin of a belief 
is one thing and its validity quite another. The 
way in which we came to hold the belief is a matter 
of historical investigation, and undoubtedly may 
form a very fascinating enquiry. But the question 
whether the belief is true is a question which has to 
be considered, no matter how I got it, just as the 
question whether I am committing a trespass or not 
in being on a piece of ground cannot be settled by 
any amount of explaining how I got there. Or, 
to put it in another way, the very risky path by which 
I have scrambled up a cliff does not make the top 
any the less safe when I have got there. 

But though it is perfectly logical to insist on the 
distinction between the origin and the validity of any 
belief, and to refuse to question or doubt the validity 
of the belief in immortality merely because of the 
origin ascribed to it by authorities on primitive cul- 
ture, — that is no reason why we should not examine 
the origin suggested for it, to see whether it is a satis- 
factory origin. And that is what I propose now to do. 
I wish to suggest first that belief in the appearance of 



40 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

the dead, whether to the dreamer or the ghost-seer, 
is an intellectual belief as to what occurs as a mat- 
ter of fact ; and next that thereby it is distinguished 
from the desire for immortality which manifests it- 
self with comparative universality amongst the lower 
races. 

Now, that the appearance of the dead, whether to 
the waking or the sleeping eye, is sufficient to start 
the intellectual belief will be admitted alike by those 
who do and those who do not hold that it is suffi- 
cient logically to warrant the belief. But to say that 
it starts the desire to see him or her whom we have 
lost, would be ridiculous. On the contrary, it would 
be much nearer the truth to say that it is the longing 
and the desire to see, once again, the loved one, that 
sets the mind a-dreaming, and first gives to the heart 
hope. The fact that, were there no desire for the 
continuance of life after the death of the body, the 
belief would never have caught on — that it either 
would never have arisen or would have soon ceased 
to exist — is shown by the simple consideration that 
only where the desire for the continuance of life 
after death dies down does the belief in immortality 
tend to wane. If any further evidence of that is 
required it may be found in the teaching of those 



IMMORTALITY 41 

forms of philosophy and religion which endeavour 
to dispense with the belief in immortality, for they 
all recognise and indeed proclaim that they are based 
on the denial of the desire and the will to live. If, 
and only if — as, and only as — the desire to live, 
here and hereafter, can be suppressed, can the be- 
lief in immortality be eradicated. The basis of the 
belief is the desire for continued existence; and 
that is why the attempt to trace the origin of the be- 
lief in immortality back to the belief in dreams and 
apparitions is one which is not perfectly satisfactory ; 
it leaves out of account the desire without which the 
belief would not be and is not operative. 

But though it leaves out an element which is at 
least as important as any element it includes, it 
would be an error to take no account of what it does 
contribute. It would be an error of this kind if we 
closed our eyes to the fact that what first arrests 
the attention of man, in the lower stages of his evolu- 
tion, is the survival of others than himself. That 
is the belief which first manifests itself in his heart 
and mind ; and what first reveals it to him is the ap- 
pearance of the dead to his sleeping or his waking 
eye. He does not first hope or believe that he him- 
self will survive the death of the body and then go 



42 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

on to infer that therefore others also will similarly sur- 
vive. On the contrary, it is the appearance of others 
in his sleeping or waking moments that first gives 
him the idea; and it is only later and on reflection 
that it occurs to him that he also will have, or be, a 
ghost. 

But though we must recognise the intellectual ele- 
ment in the belief and the intellectual processes 
which are involved in the belief, we must also take 
into account the emotional element, the element of 
desire. And first we should notice that the desire is 
not a selfish or self-regarding desire ; it is the longing 
for one loved and lost, of the mother for her child, 
or of the child for its mother. It is desire of that 
kind which gives to dreams and apparitions their 
emotional value, without which they would have little 
significance and no spiritual importance. That is 
the direction in which we must look for the reason 
why, on the one hand, belief in the continuation of 
existence after death seems at first to have no con- 
nection with religion, while, on the other hand, the 
connection is ultimately shown by the evolution of 
belief to be so intimate that neither can attain its 
proper development without the other. 

Dreams are occasions on which the longing for 



IMMORTALITY 43 

one loved and lost manifests itself, but they are not the 
cause or the origin of the affection and the longing. 
But dreams are not exclusively, specially, or even 
usually the domain in which religion plays a part. 
Hence the visions of the night, in which the memory 
of the departed and the craving for reunion with them 
are manifested, bear no necessary reference to reli- 
gion ; and it is therefore possible, and prima facie 
plausible, to maintain that the belief in the immor- 
tality of the soul has its origin in a centre quite dis- 
tinct from the sphere of religion, and that it is only 
very slowly, if at all, that the belief in immortality 
comes to be incorporated with religion. On the other 
hand, the very craving for reunion or continued com- 
munion with those who are felt not to be lost but gone 
before, is itself the feeling which is, not the base, 
but at the base, of religion. In the lowest forms 
to which religion can be reduced, or in which it 
manifests itself, religion is a bond of community; 
it manifests itself externally in joint acts of worship, 
internally in the feeling that the worshippers are 
bound together by it and united with the object of 
their worship. This feeling of communion is not a 
mere article of intellectual belief, nor is it imposed 
upon the members ; it is what they themselves desire. 



44 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Hoffding states the truth when he says that in its 
most rudimentary form we encounter " religion under 
the guise of desire"; but in saying so he omits the 
essence of the truth, that essence without which 
the truth that he partially enunciates may become 
wholly misleading, — he omits to say, and I think he 
fails to see, that the desire which alone can claim to 
be considered as religious is the desire of the com- 
munity, not of the individual as such, and the desire 
of the community as united in common worship. The 
idea of religion as a bond of spiritual communion is 
implicit from the first, even though a long process 
of evolution be necessary to disentangle it and set it 
forth self-consciously. Now, it is precisely this spir- 
itual communion of which man becomes conscious 
in his craving after reunion or continued communion 
with those who have departed this life. And it is 
with the history of his attempts to harmonise this 
desire with what he knows and demands of the 
universe otherwise, that we are here and now con- 
cerned. 

So strong is that desire, so inconceivable is the 
idea that death ends all, and divorces from us forever 
those we have loved and lost awhile, that the lower 
races of mankind have been pretty generally driven 



IMMORTALITY 45 

to the conclusion that death is a mistake or due to a 
mistake. It is widely held that there is no such 
thing as a natural death. Men do of course die, they 
may be killed ; but it is not an ordinance of nature that 
a man must be killed ; and, if he is killed, his death 
is not natural. So strong is this feeling that when a 
man dies and his death is not obviously a case of 
murder, the inference which the savage prefers to 
draw is that the death is really a case of murder, 
but that the murder has been worked by witchcraft 
or magic. Amongst the Australian black fellows, as 
we are told by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "no 
such thing as natural death is realised by the native ; 
a man who dies has of necessity been killed by some 
other man or perhaps even by a woman, and sooner 
or later that man or woman will be attacked; " con- 
sequently, "in very many cases there takes place 
what the white man, not seeing beneath the surface, 
not unnaturally describes as secret murder; but in 
reality . . . every case of such secret murder, when 
one or more men stealthily stalk their prey with the 
object of killing him, is in reality the exacting of a 
life for a life, the accused person being indicated by 
the so-called medicine man as one who has brought 
about the death of another man by magic, and whose 



46 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

life must therefore be forfeited" {Native Tribes of 
Central Australia, p. 48). 

What underlies this idea that by man alone is 
death brought into the world is that death is un- 
natural and is no part of the original design of things. 
When the fact comes to be recognised undeniably 
that deaths not caused by human agency do take 
place, then the fact requires explanation; and the 
explanation on which primitive races, quite indepen- 
dently of each other, hit is that as death was no part of 
the original design of things, its introduction was due 
to accident or mistake. Either men were originally 
exempt from death, or they were intended to be 
exempt. If they were intended to be exempt, then 
the inference drawn is that the intention was frus- 
trated by the carelessness of the agent intrusted with 
the duty of making men deathless. If they were 
originally exempt from death, then the loss of the 
exemption has to be accounted for. And in either 
case the explanation takes the form of a narrative 
which relates how the mistake took place or what 
event it was that caused the loss of the exemption. 
I need not quote examples of either class of narrative. 
What I wish to do is to emphasise the fact that by 
primitive man death is felt to be inconsistent with the 



IMMORTALITY 47 

scheme of things. First, therefore, he denies that 
it can come in the course of nature, though he admits 
that it may be procured by the wicked man in the 
way of murder or magic. And it is at this stage that 
his hope of reunion with those loved and lost scarcely 
stretches beyond the prospect of their return to this 
world. Evidence of this stage is found partly in tales 
such as those told of the mother who returns to revisit 
her child, or of persons restored to life. Stories of 
this latter kind come from Tasmania, Australia, and 
Samoa, amongst other places, and are found amongst 
the Eskimo and American Indians, as well as 
amongst the Fjorts (J. A. MacCullough, The Child- 
hood of Fiction, ch. IV). Even more direct evi- 
dence of the emotion which prompts these stories is 
afforded by the Ho dirge, quoted by Professor Tylor 
(P. C, II, 32, 33):- 

"We never scolded you; never wronged you; 

Come to us back ! 
We ever loved and cherished you ; and have lived long together 

Under the same roof; 

Desert it not now ! 
The rainy nights and the cold blowing days are coming on; 

Do not wander here ! 
Do not stand by the burnt ashes ; come to us again ! 
You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes 
down. 



48 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind. 

Come to your home ! 
It is swept for you and clean ; and we are there who loved you 

ever; 
And there is rice put for you and water; 

Come home, come home, come to us again ! " 

In these verses it is evident that the death of the 
body is recognised as a fact. It is even more mani- 
fest that the death of the body is put aside as weigh- 
ing for naught against the absolute conviction that 
the loved one still exists. But reunion is sought in 
this world; another world is not yet thought of. 
The next world has not yet been called into existence 
to redress the sorrows and the sufferings of this life. 
Where the discovery of that solution has not been 
made, the human mind seeks such consolation as 
may be found elsewhere. If the aspiration, "come 
to us, come to us again," can find no other realisation, 
it welcomes the reappearance of the lost one in an- 
other form. In Australia, amongst the Euahlayi tribe, 
the mother who has lost her baby or her young child 
may yet believe that it is restored to her and born 
again in the form of another child. In West Africa, 
according to Miss Kingsley, "the new babies as they 
arrived in the family were shown a selection of small 
articles belonging to deceased members whose souls 



IMMORTALITY 49 

were still absent, — the thing the child caught hold 
of identified him. 'Why, he's Uncle John; see! 
he knows his own pipe;' or 'That's Cousin Emma; 
see! she knows her market calabash;' and so on." 
But it is not only amongst Australian black fellows 
or West African negroes that the attempt is made 
to extract consolation for death from the speculation 
that we die only to be reborn in this world. The 
theory of rebirth is put forward by a distinguished 
student of Hegel — Dr. McTaggart — in a work 
entitled Some Dogmas of Religion. It is admitted 
by Dr. McTaggart to be true that we have no memory 
whatever of our previous stages of existence ; but he 
declares, "we may say that, in spite of the loss of 
memory, it is the same person who lives in the suc- 
cessive lives" (p. 130); and he appears to find the 
same consolation as his remote forefathers did in 
looking forward to a future stage of existence in 
which he will have no more memory of his present 
existence, and no more reason to believe in it, than 
he now has memory of, or reason to believe in, his 
preexistence. "It is certain," he says, "that in 
this life we remember no previous lives," and he 
accepts the position that it is equally certain we shall 
have in our next life absolutely no memory of our 

E 



50 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

present existence. That, of course, distinguishes 
Dr. McTaggart from the West African Uncle John 
who, when he is reborn, at any rate " knows his own 
pipe." 

The human mind, as I have said, seeks such con- 
solation as it may find in the doctrine of rebirth. 
It finds evidence of rebirth either in the behaviour 
of the new-born child or in its resemblance to de- 
ceased relations. But it also comes to the conclu- 
sion that the reincarnation may be in animal form. 
Whether that conclusion is suggested by the strangely 
human expression in the eyes of some animals, or 
whether it is based upon the belief in the power of 
transformation, need not be discussed. It is be- 
yond doubt that transformation is believed in: the 
Cherokee Indian sings a verse to the effect that he be- 
comes a real wolf; and " after stating that he has 
become a real wolf, the songster utters a prolonged 
howl, and paws the ground like a wolf with his feet" 
(Frazer, Kingship, p. 71). Indeed, identity may be 
attained or manifested without any process of trans- 
formation; in Australia, amongst the Dieri tribe, 
the head man of a totem consisting of a particular 
sort of a seed is spoken of by his people as being the 
plant itself which yields the seed (ib., p. 109). 



IMMORTALITY 5 1 

Where such beliefs are prevalent, the doctrine of the 
reincarnation of the soul in animal form will obvi- 
ously arise at the stage of evolution which we are 
now discussing, that is to say when the soul is not 
yet supposed to depart to another world, and must 
therefore manifest itself in this world in one way 
or another, if not in human shape, then in animal 
form. In the form of what animal the deceased will 
be reincarnated is a question which will be an- 
swered in different ways. Purely fortuitous circum- 
stances may lead to particular animals being con- 
sidered to be the reincarnation of the deceased. 
Or the fact that the deceased has a particular ani- 
mal for totem may lead the survivors to expect his 
reappearance in the form of that particular animal. 
The one fact of importance for our present purpose 
is that at its origin the belief in animal reincarnation 
had no necessary connection with the theory of 
future punishments and rewards. At the stage of 
evolution in which the belief in transmigration arose 
many animals were the object of genuine respect 
because of the virtues of courage, etc., which were 
manifested by them ; or because of the position they 
occupied as totems. Consequently no loss of status 
was involved when the soul transmigrated from a 



52 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

human to an animal form. No notion of punish- 
ment was involved in the belief. 

The doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration 
belong to a stage in the evolution of belief, or to a 
system of thought, in which the conviction that the 
death of the body does not entail the destruction of 
the soul is undoubted, but from which the concep- 
tion, indeed the very idea, of another world than this 
is excluded. That conception begins to manifest 
itself where ancestor worship establishes itself ; but 
the manifestation is incomplete. Deceased chief- 
tains and heroes, who have been benefactors to the 
tribe, are remembered; and the good they did is 
remembered also. They are themselves remembered 
as the doers of good ; and their spirits are naturally 
conceived as continuing to be benevolent, or ready 
to confer benefits when properly approached. But 
thus envisaged, they are seen rather in their rela- 
tion to the living than in their relation to each other. 
It is their assistance in this world that is sought; 
their condition in the next world is of less practical 
importance and therefore provokes less of speculation, 
in the first instance. But when speculation is 
provoked, it proves ultimately fatal to ancestor wor- 
ship. 



IMMORTALITY 53 

First, it may lead to the question of the relation 
of the spirits of the deceased benefactors to the god 
or gods of the community. There will be a tendency 
to blur the distinction between the god and his 
worshippers, if any of the worshippers come to be 
regarded as being after death spirits from whom 
aid may be invoked and to whom offerings must 
be made. And if the distinction ceases after death, 
it is difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain 
it during life; an emperor who is to be deified after 
death may find his deification beginning before his 
death. Belief in such deification may be accepted 
by some members of the community. Others 
will regard it as proof that religion is naught; and 
yet others will be driven to seek for a form of religion 
which affords no place for such deifications, but main- 
tains explicitly that distinction between a god and 
his worshippers which is present in the most rudi- 
mentary forms of religion. 

But though the tendency of ancestor worship 
is to run this course and to pass in this way out of 
the evolution of religion, it may be arrested at the 
very outset, if the religious spirit is, as it has been 
in one case at least, strong enough to stand against 
it at the beginning. Thus, amongst the Jews there 



54 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

was a tendency to ancestor worship, as is shown 
by the fact of its prohibition. But it was stamped 
out ; and it was stamped out so effectually that belief 
in the continued existence of the soul after death 
ceased for long to have any practical influence. 
" Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the 
grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent 
existence, 'the land where all things are forgotten'" 
(Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. Sheol). "In 
death," the Psalmist says to the Lord, "there is no 
remembrance of thee : in Sheol who shall give thee 
thanks?" "Shall they that are deceased arise and 
praise thee? Shall thy loving-kindness be declared 
in the grave?" or "thy righteousness in the land of 
f orgetfulness ? " Thus the Sheol of the Old Testa- 
ment remains to testify to the view taken of the state 
of the dead by a people amongst whom the worship 
of ancestors was arrested at the outset. Amongst 
such a people the dead are supposed simply to con- 
tinue in the next world as they left this: "in Sheol 
the kings of the nations have their thrones, and the 
mighty their weapons of war," just as in Virgil 
the ghost of Deiphobus still shows the ghastly 
wounds by which he perished (Jevons, History of 
Religion, p. 301). 



IMMORTALITY 55 

This continuation theory, the view that the dead 
continue in the next world as they left this, means 
that, to the people who entertain it, the dead are 
merely a memory. It is forbidden to think of them 
as doing anything, as affecting the living in any way. 
They are conceived as powerless to gratify the wishes 
of the living, or to thwart them. Where the Lord 
God is a jealous God, religion cannot tolerate the 
idea that any other spirit should be conceived as 
usurping His functions, still less that such spirits 
should receive the offerings and the prayers which 
are the due of Him alone. But though the dead are 
thus reduced to a mere memory, the memory itself 
does not and cannot die. Accordingly the dead, 
or rather those whose bodies are dead, continue to 
live. But, as they exercise no action in, or control 
over, the world of the living, their place of abode 
comes to be regarded as another world, to which 
they are confined. Speculation, therefore, where 
speculation is made, as to the case of the inhabitants 
of this other world, must take the direction of en- 
quiring as to their fate. Where speculation is not 
made, the dead are conceived merely to continue to 
be as they are remembered to have been in this 
life. But, if there is to be room for any speculation 



56 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

at all, there must be assumed to be some diversity 
in their fate, and therefore some reason, intelligible 
to man, for that diversity. That is a conclusion to 
which tribes attain who have apparently gone through 
no period of ancestor worship, — indeed, ancestor 
worship only impedes or defers the attainment of 
that conclusion. The diversity of fate could only 
consist in the difference between being where you 
would be and being where you would not. But 
the reasons for that diversity may be very different 
amongst different peoples. First, where religion 
is at its lowest or is in its least developed form, the 
gods are not the cause of the diversity nor do they 
seem concerned in it. Such diversity as there is 
seems in its simplest form merely to be a continuance 
of the social distinctions which prevail among the 
living : the high chieftains rest in a calm, plenteous, 
sunny land in the sky; while "all Indians of low 
degree go deep down under the earth to the land of 
Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and 
no deer, and blankets so small and thin, that when 
the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets 
with them" (Tylor, P. C, II, 85). Elsewhere, it 
is not social distinctions, but moral, that make the 
difference: "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil think 



IMMORTALITY 57 

the souls of such as had lived virtuously, that is to 
say who have well avenged themselves and eaten 
many of their enemies," (ib.) rejoin the souls of their 
fathers in the happy land, while the cowards go 
to the other place. Thus, though the distinctions 
in the next world do not seem originally to have 
sprung from or to have been connected with morality, 
and still less with religion, they are, or may be at 
a very early period, seized upon by the moral con- 
sciousness as containing truth or implying it, when 
rightly understood. Truth indeed of the highest 
import for morality is implied in the distinctions 
thus essayed to be drawn. But before the truth 
implicit could be made explicit, it was necessary 
that the distinctions should be recognised to have 
their basis in religion. And that was impossible 
where religion was at its lowest or in its least de- 
veloped form. 

From the fact that on the one hand the conception 
of a future life in another world, when it arose 
amongst people in a low stage of religious develop- 
ment, bore but little moral and no religious fruit; 
and on the other, where it did yield fruit, there had 
been a previous period when religion closed its 
eyes as far as possible to the condition of the dead 



58 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

in Hades or in Sheol, — we may draw the inference 
that the conception of the future state formed by such 
people, as "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil" had 
to be sterilised, so to speak, — to be purified from 
associations dangerous both to morality and reli- 
gion. We may fairly say that as a matter of fact 
that was the consequence which actually happened, 
and that both in Greece and Judaea the prospect of a 
future life at one time became practically a tabula 
rasa on which might be written a fairer message of 
hope than had ever been given before. In Greece 
the message was written, indeed, and was received 
with hope by the thousands who joined in the cele- 
bration of the mysteries. But the characters in 
which it was written faded soon. The message 
was found to reveal nothing. It revealed nothing 
because it demanded nothing. It demanded neither 
a higher life nor a higher conception of the deity. 
It did not set forth a new and nobler morality ; and 
it accommodated itself to the existing polytheism. 
What it did do was to familiarise the Hellenic world 
with the conviction that there was a life hereafter, 
better than this life; and that the condition of its 
attainment was communion with the true God, 
peradventure He could be found. It was by this 



IMMORTALITY 59 

conviction and this expectation that the ground was 
prepared, wherever Hellenism existed, for the mes- 
sage that was to come from Israel. 

From the beginning, or let us say in the lowest 
forms in which religion manifests itself, religion is 
the bond in which the worshippers are united with 
one another and with their God. The community 
which is thus united is at first the earliest form of 
society, whatever that form may have been, in which 
men dwell together for their common purposes. 
It is the fact that its members have common pur- 
poses and common interests which constitute them 
a community; and amongst the common interests 
without which there could be no community is 
that of common worship : knowledge of the sacra, 
being confined to the members of the community, 
is the test by which members are known, outsiders 
excluded, and the existence of the community as 
a community secured. At this stage, in a large 
number of societies — negro, Malayo-Polynesian, 
North American Indians, Eskimo, Australians — 
the belief in reincarnation takes a form in which the 
presence of souls of the departed is recognised as 
necessary to the very conception of the community. 
Thus in Alaska, among the Unalits of St. Michael's 



6o COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Bay, a festival of the dead is observed, the equiva- 
lent of which appears to be found amongst all 
the Eskimo. M. Mauss {UAnnee Sociologique, IX, 
99) thus describes it: "It comprises two essential 
parts. It begins with praying the souls of the dead 
graciously to consent to reincarnate themselves 
for the moment in the namesake which each de- 
ceased person has; for the custom is that in each 
station the child last born always takes the name 
of the last person who has died. Then these living 
representatives of the deceased receive presents, 
and having received them the souls are dismissed 
from the abodes of the living to return to the land 
of the dead. Thus at this festival not only does 
the group regain its unity, but the rite reconstitutes 
the ideal group which consists of all the generations 
which have succeeded one another from the earliest 
times. Mythical and historic ancestors as well as 
later ones thus mingle with the living, and com- 
munion between them is conducted by means of 
the exchange of presents." Amongst people other 
than the Eskimo, a new-born child not only takes 
the name of the last member of the family or clan 
who has died, but is regarded as the reincarnation of 
the deceased. "Thus the number of individuals, 



IMMORTALITY 6 1 

of names, of souls, of social functions in the clan is 
limited ; and the life of the clan consists in the death 
and rebirth of individuals who are always identically 
the same" (I.e. 267). 

The line of evolution thus followed by the belief 
in reincarnation results in the total separation of the 
belief from morality and from religion, and results 
in rendering it infertile alike for morality, religion, 
and progress in civilisation generally. Where the 
belief in reincarnation takes the form of belief in 
the transmigration of the soul into some animal 
form, it may be utilised for moral purposes, provided 
that the people amongst whom the belief obtains 
have otherwise advanced so far as to see that the 
punishments and rewards which are essential to the 
development of morality are by no means always 
realised in this life. When that conviction has 
established itself, the reincarnation theory will 
provide machinery by which the belief in future 
punishments and rewards can be conceived as 
operative: rebirth in animal form, if the belief in 
it already exists, may be held out as a deterrent to 
wrongdoing. That is, as a matter of fact, the use 
to which the belief has been put by Buddhism. The 
form and station in which the deceased will be re- 



62 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

born is no longer, as amongst the peoples just men- 
tioned, conceived to be determined automatically, 
so to speak, but is supposed to depend on the moral 
qualities exhibited during life. If this view of the 
future life has struck deeper root and has spread 
over a greater surface than the doctrine taught in 
the Greek mysteries ever did, the reason may prob- 
ably be found in the fact that the Greek mysteries 
had no higher morality to teach than was already 
recognised, whilst the moral teaching of the Buddha 
was far more exalted and far more profoundly true 
than anything that had been preached in India 
before. If a moral system by itself, on its own 
merits, were capable of affording a sure foundation 
for religion, Buddhism would be built upon a rock. 
To the spiritual community by which man may be 
united to his fellow-man and to his God, morality 
is essential and indispensable. But the moral life 
derives its value solely from the fact that on it 
depends, and by means of it is realised, that com- 
munion of man with God after which man has from 
the beginning striven. If then that communion and 
the very possibility of that communion is denied, 
the denial must prove fatal alike to religion and to 
morality. Now, that is the denial which Buddhism 



IMMORTALITY 63 

makes. But the fact of the denial is obscured to 
those who believe, and to those who would like to 
believe, in Buddhism, by the way in which it is made. 
It is made in such a way that it appears and is 
believed to be an affirmation instead of a denial. 
Communion with God is declared to be the final end 
to which the transmigration of souls conducts. But 
the communion to which it leads is so intimate that 
the human soul, the individual, ceases to be. Ob- 
viously, therefore, if it ceases to be, the communion 
also must cease; there is no real communion sub- 
sisting between two spirits, the human and the divine, 
for two spirits do not exist, but only one. If this 
way of stating the case be looked upon with sus- 
picion as possibly not doing justice to the teaching 
of Buddhism, or as pressing unduly far the union 
between the human and the divine which is the 
ultimate goal of the transmigration of souls, the 
reply is that in truth the case against Buddhism 
is stronger than appears from this mode of stating 
it. To say that from the Buddhist point of view 
the human soul, the individual, eventually ceases to 
be, is indeed an incorrect way of putting the matter. 
It implies that the human soul, the individual, now 
is; and hereafter ceases to be. But so far from 



64 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

admitting that the individual now is, the Buddhist 
doctrine is that the existence of the soul, now, is 
mere illusion, mdyd. It is therefore logical enough, 
and at any rate self-consistent, to say that hereafter, 
when the series of transmigrations is complete, the 
individual will not indeed cease to be, for he never 
was, but the illusion that he existed will be dissipated. 
Logically again, it follows from this that if the exist- 
ence of the individual soul is an illusion from the 
beginning, then there can strictly speaking be no 
transmigration of souls, for there is no soul to trans- 
migrate. But with perfect self-consistency Buddh- 
ism accepts this position : what is transmitted from 
one being to the next in the chain of existences is 
not the individuality or the soul, but the character. 
Professor Rhys Davids says (Hibbert Lectures, pp. 
91, 92): "I have no hesitation in maintaining 
that Gotama did not teach the transmigration of 
souls. What he did teach would be better sum- 
marized, if we wish to retain the word transmigra- 
tion, as the transmigration of character. But 
it would be more accurate to drop the word trans- 
migration altogether when speaking of Buddhism, 
and to call its doctrine the doctrine of karma. 
Gotama held that after the death of any being, 



IMMORTALITY 65 

whether human or not, there survived nothing at 
all but that being's 'karma/ the result, that is, of 
its mental and bodily actions." "He discarded the 
theory of the presence, within each human body, 
of a soul which could have a separate and eternal 
existence. He therefore established a new identity 
between the individuals in the chain of existence, 
which he, like his forerunners, acknowledged, by 
the new assertion that that which made two beings 
to be the same being was — not soul, but — karma" 
(ib. } pp. 93, 94). Thus once more it appears that 
there can be no eventual communion between 
the human soul, at the end of its chain of existence, 
and the divine, for the reason, not that the human 
soul ultimately ceases to be, but that it never is or 
was, and therefore neither transmigrates from one 
body to another, nor is eventually absorbed in the 
dtmdn. 

Logically consistent though this train of argu- 
ment be, it leaves unanswered the simple question, 
How can the result of my actions have any interest 
for me — not hereafter, but at the present moment — 
if I not only shall not exist hereafter but do not exist 
at the present moment ? It is not impossible for a 
man who believes that his existence will absolutely 



66 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

cease at death to take some interest in and labour 
for the good of others who will come after him; 
but it is impossible for a man who does not exist 
now to believe in anything whatever. And it is 
on that fundamental absurdity that Buddhism is 
built : it is directed to the conversion of those who 
do not exist to be converted, and it is directed to the 
object of relieving from existence those who have 
no existence from which to be relieved. 

Where then lies the strength of Buddhism, if as 
a logical structure it is rent from top to bottom by 
glaring inconsistency? It lies in its appeal to the 
spirit of self-sacrifice. What it denounces, from 
beginning to end, is the will to live. The reason 
why it denounces the will to live is that that will 
manifests itself exclusively in the desires of the indi- 
vidual; and it is to the desires of man that all the 
misery in the world are directly due. Destroy those 
desires by annihilating the will to live — and in no 
other way can they be destroyed — and the misery 
of the world will cease. The only termination to 
the misery of the world which Buddhism can imagine 
is the voluntary cessation of life which will ultimately 
ensue on the cessation of the will to live. And 
the means by which that is to be brought about is 



IMMORTALITY 67 

the uprooting and destruction of the self-regarding 
desires by means of the higher morality of self-sac- 
rifice. What the Buddhist overlooks is that the 
uprooting and destruction of the self-regarding 
desires results, not in the annihilation, but in the 
purification and enhanced vitality, of the self that 
uproots them. The outcome of the unselfish and 
self-sacrificing life is not the destruction of individ- 
uality, but its highest realisation. Now, it is only in 
society and by living for others that this unselfishness 
and self-sacrifice can be carried out ; man can only 
exist and unselfishness can only operate in society, 
and society means the communion of man with his 
fellows. It is true that only in society can self- 
ishness exist; but it is recognized from the begin- 
ning as that which is destructive of society, and it 
is therefore condemned alike by the morality and the 
religion of the society. The communion of man with 
his fellows and his God is hindered, impeded, and 
blocked wholly and solely by his self -regarding de- 
sires ; it is furthered and realised solely by his unselfish 
desires. But his unselfish desires involve and imply 
his existence — I was going to say, just as much, I 
mean — far more than his selfish desires, for they 
imply, and are only possible on, the assumption of 



68 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

the existence of his fellow-man, and of his com- 
munion with him. Nay ! more, by the testimony 
of Buddhism itself as well as of the religious ex- 
perience of mankind at large, the unselfish desires, 
the spirit of self-sacrifice, require both for their 
logical and their emotional justification, still more 
for their practical operation, the faith that by means 
of them the will of God is carried out, and that in 
them man shows likest God. It is in them and by 
them that the communion of man with his fellow- 
man and with his God is realised. It is the faith 
that such communion, though it may be interrupted, 
can never be entirely broken which manifests itself 
in the belief in immortality. That belief may take 
shape in the idea that the souls of the departed 
revisit this earth temporarily in ghostly form, or 
more permanently as reincarnated in the new-born 
members of the tribe; it may body forth another 
world of bliss or woe, and if it is to subserve the 
purposes of morality, it must so do ; nay ! more, if 
it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it is into 
the presence of the Lord that the soul must go. But 
in any and whatever shape the belief takes, the soul 
is conceived or implied to be in communion with 
other spirits. There is no other way in which it is 



IMMORTALITY 69 

possible to conceive the existence of a soul; just 
as any particle of matter, to be comprehended in its 
full reality, implies not only every other particle of 
matter but the universe which comprehends them, 
so the existence of any spirit logically implies not 
only the existence of every other but also of Him 
without whom no one of them could be. 

It is in this belief in the communion of spirits 
wherever he may find it — and where will he not ? 
— that the missionary may obtain a leverage for 
his work. It is a sure basis for his operations be- 
cause the desire for communion is universal; and 
Christianity alone, of the religions of the world, 
teaches that self-sacrifice is the way to life eternal. 



MAGIC 

Of all the topics which present themselves to 
the student of the science of religion for investiga- 
tion and explanation there is none which has caused 
more diversity of opinion, none which has produced 
more confusion of thought, than magic. The fact 
is that the belief in magic is condemned alike by- 
science and religion, — by the one as essentially ir- 
rational, and by the other as essentially irreligious. 
But though it is thus condemned, it flourishes, 
where it does flourish, as being science, though 
of a more secret kind than that usually recognised, 
or as being a more potent application of the rites 
and ceremonies of religion. It is indeed neither 
science nor religion; it lives by mimicking one 
or other or both. In the natural history of belief 
it owes its survival, so long as it does survive, to 
its " protective colouring" and its power of mim- 
icry. It is, always and everywhere, an error, — 
whether tried by the canons of science or religion ; 

70 



MAGIC f I 

but it lives, as error can only live, by posing and 
passing itself off as truth. 

If now the only persons deceived by it were the 
persons who believed in it, students of the science 
of religion would have been saved from much 
fruitless controversy. But so subtly protective is 
its colouring that some scientific enquirers have 
confidently and unhesitatingly identified it with 
religion, and have declared that magic is religion, 
and religion is magic. The tyranny of that error, 
however, is now well-nigh overpast. It is erroneous, 
and we may suppose is seen to be erroneous, in 
exactly the same way as it would be to say that 
science is magic, and magic science. The truth 
is that magic in one aspect is a colourable imitation 
of science: "in short," as Dr. Frazer says {Early 
History of the Kingship, p. 38), "magic is a spuri- 
ous system of natural law." That is, we must note, 
it is a system which is spurious in our eyes, but 
which, to those who believed in it, was "a statement 
of the rules which determine the sequence of events 
throughout the world — a set of precepts which 
human beings observe in order to compare their 
ends" (ib., p. 39). 

The point, then, from which I wish to start is that 



72 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

magic, as it is now viewed by students of the science 
of religion, on the one hand is a spurious system 
of natural law or science, and on the other a spurious 
system of religion. 

Our next point is that magic could not be spurious 
for those who believed in it : they held that they knew 
some things and could do things which ordinary 
people did not know and could not do ; and, whether 
their knowledge was of the secrets of nature or of 
the spirit world, it was not in their eyes spurious. 

Our third point is more difficult to explain, though 
it will appear not merely obvious, but self-evident, 
if I succeed in explaining it. It will facilitate the 
work of explanation, if you will for the moment 
suppose — without considering whether the sup- 
position is true or not — that there was a time 
when no one had heard that there was such a thing 
as magic. Let us further suppose that at that time 
man had observed such facts as that heat produces 
warmth, that the young of animals and man resemble 
their parents : in a word, that he had attained more 
or less consciously to the idea, as a matter of ob- 
servation, that like produces like, and as a matter 
of practice that like may be produced by like. 
Having attained to that practical idea, he will of 



MAGIC 73 

course work it not only for all that it is worth, but 
for more. That is indeed the only way he has of 
finding out how much it is good for ; and it is only 
repeated failure which will convince him that here 
at length he has reached the limit, that in this par- 
ticular point things do not realise his expectations, 
that in this instance his anticipation of nature 
has been "too previous." Until that fact has been 
hammered into him, he will go on expecting and 
believing that in this instance also like will produce 
like, when he sets it to work; and he will be per- 
fectly convinced that he is employing the natural 
and reasonable means for attaining his end. As 
a matter of fact, however, as we with our superior 
knowledge can see, in the first place those means 
never can produce the desired effect; and next, 
the idea that they can, as it withers and before it 
finally falls to the ground, will change its colour 
and assume the hue of magic. Thus the idea 
that by whistling you can produce a wind is 
at first as natural and as purely rational as the 
idea that you can produce warmth by means of 
fire. There is nothing magical in either. Both 
are matter-of-fact applications of the practical maxim 
that like produces like. 



74 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

That, then, is the point which I have been wishing 
to make, the third of the three points from which 
I wish to start. There are three ways of looking 
at identically the same thing, e.g. whistling to pro- 
duce a wind. First, we may regard it, and I suggest 
that it was in the beginning regarded, as an ap- 
plication, having nothing to distinguish it from 
any other application, of the general maxim that 
like produces like. The idea that eating the flesh 
of deer makes a man timid, or that if you wish to 
be strong and bold you should eat tiger, is, in this 
stage of thought, no more magical than is the idea 
of drinking water because you are dry. 

Next, the idea of whistling to produce a wind, 
or of sticking splinters of bone into a man's foot- 
prints in order to injure his feet, may be an idea 
not generally known, a thing not commonly done, 
a proceeding not generally approved of. It is thus 
marked off from the commonplace actions of 
drinking water to moisten your parched throat or 
sitting by a fire to get warm. When it is thus 
marked off, it is regarded as magic : not every one 
knows how to do it, or not every one has the power 
to do it, or not every one cares to do it. That is 
the second stage, the heyday of magic. 



MAGIC 75 

The third and final stage is that in which no 
educated person believes in it, when, if a man thinks 
to get a wind by whistling he may whistle for it. 
These three ways of looking at identically the same 
thing may and do coexist. The idea of whistling 
for a wind is for you and me simply a mistaken idea ; 
but possibly at this moment there are sailors act- 
ing upon the idea and to some of them it appears a 
perfectly natural thing to do, while to others there 
is a flavour of the magical about it. But though 
the three ways may and do coexist, it is obvious 
that our way of looking at it is and must be the 
the latest of the three, for the simple reason that 
an error must exist before it can be exploded. I 
say that our way of looking at it must be the latest, 
but in saying so I do not mean to imply that this 
way of looking at it originates only at a late stage 
in the history of mankind. On the contrary, it is 
present in a rudimentary form from very early 
times ; and the proof is the fact generally recognised 
that magicians amongst the lowest races, though 
they may believe to a certain extent in their own 
magical powers, do practise a good deal of magic 
which they themselves know to be fraudulent. 
Progress takes place when other people also, and a 



76 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

steadily increasing number of people, come to see 
that it is fraudulent. 

In the next place, just as amongst very primitive 
peoples we see that some magic is known by some 
people, viz. the magicians themselves, to be fraudu- 
lent, though other people believe in it ; so, amongst 
very primitive peoples, we find beliefs and practices 
existing which have not yet come to be regarded 
as magical, though they are such as might come, and 
do elsewhere come, to be considered pure magic. 
Thus, for instance, when Cherokee Indians who 
suffer from rheumatism abstain from eating the 
flesh of the common grey squirrel " because the 
squirrel eats in a cramped position, which would 
clearly aggravate the pangs of the rheumatic patient " 
(Frazer, History of the Kingship, p. 70), or when 
"they will not wear the feathers of the bald-headed 
buzzard for fear of themselves becoming bald" (ib.), 
they are simply following the best medical advice 
of their day, — they certainly do not imagine they 
are practising magic, any more than you or I do 
when we are following the prescriptions of our 
medical adviser. On the contrary, it is quite as 
obvious, then, that the feathers of the bald-headed 
buzzard are infectious as it is now that the clothes 



MAGIC 77 

of a fever patient are infectious. Neither proposi- 
tion, to be accepted as true, requires us to believe 
in magic : either might spring up where magic 
had never been heard of. And, if that is the case, 
it simply complicates things unnecessarily to talk 
of magic in such cases. The tendency to believe 
that like produces like is not a consequence of or 
a deduction from a belief in magic : on the contrary, 
magic has its root or one of its roots in that tendency 
of the human mind. But though that tendency 
helps to produce magic amongst other things, 
magic is not the only thing which it produces: it 
produces beliefs such as those of the Cherokees 
just quoted, which are no more magical than the 
belief that fire produces warmth, or that causa 
aequat effectum, that an effect is, when analysed, 
indistinguishable from the conditions which con- 
stitute it. 

To attempt to define magic is a risky thing; 
and, instead of doing so at once, I will try to mark 
off proceedings which are not magical ; and I would 
venture to say that things which it is believed any 
one can do, and felt that any one may do, are not 
magical in the eyes of those who have that belief 
and that feeling. You may abstain from eating 



78 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

squirrel or wearing fine feathers because of the 
consequences; and every one will think you are 
showing your common sense. You may hang up 
the bones of animals you have killed, in order to 
attract more animals of the like kind; and you 
are simply practising a dodge which you think 
will be useful. Wives whose husbands are absent 
on hunting or fighting expeditions may do or abstain 
from doing things which, on the principle that like 
produces like, will affect their husbands' success; 
and this application of the principle may be as 
irrational — and as perfectly natural — as the be- 
haviour of the beginner at billiards whose body 
writhes, when he has made his stroke, in excess of 
sympathy with the ball which just won't make the 
cannon. In both cases the principle acted on, — 
deliberately in the one case, less voluntarily in the 
other, — the instinctive feeling is that like produces 
like, not as a matter of magic but as a matter of 
fact. If the behaviour of the billiard player is due 
to an impulse which is in itself natural and in his 
case is not magical, we may fairly take the same 
view of the hunter's wife who abstains from spin- 
ning for fear the game should turn and wind like the 
spindle and the hunter be unable to hit it (Frazer, 



MAGIC 79 

p. 55). The principle in both cases is that like 
produces like. Some applications of that principle 
are correct; some are not. The incorrectness of 
the latter is not at once discovered: the belief in 
their case is erroneous, but is not known to be erro- 
neous. And unless we are prepared to take up the 
position that magic is the only form of erroneous 
belief which is to be found amongst primitive men, 
we must endeavour to draw a line between those 
erroneous beliefs which are magical and those 
erroneous beliefs which are not. The line will 
not be a hard and fast line, because a belief which 
originally had nothing magical about it may come 
to be regarded as magical. Indeed, on the assump- 
tion that belief in magic is an error, we have to 
enquire how men come to fall into the error. If 
there is no such thing as magic, how did man come 
to believe that there was? My suggestion is that 
the rise of the belief is not due to the introduction 
of a novel practice, but to a new way of looking at 
an existing practice. It is due in the first instance 
to the fact that the practice is regarded with dis- 
approval as far as its consequences are concerned 
and without regard to the means employed to pro- 
duce them. Injury to a member of the community, 



80 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

especially injury which causes death, is viewed 
by the community with indignant disapproval. 
Whether the death is produced by actual blows or 
"by drawing the figure of a person and then stabbing 
it or doing it any other injury" (Frazer, p. 41), 
it is visited with the condemnation of the com- 
munity. And consequently all such attempts "to 
injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroy- 
ing an effigy of him" {ib.) y whenever they are made, 
whether they come off or not, are resented and 
disapproved by society. On the other hand, 
sympathetic or homoeopathic magic of this kind, 
when used by the hunter or the fisherman to secure 
food, meets with no condemnation. Both assassin 
and hunter use substantially the same means to 
effect their object; but the disapproval with which 
the community views the object of the assassin is 
extended also to the means which he employs. 
In fine, the practice of using like to produce like 
comes to be looked on with loathing and with dread 
when it is employed for antisocial purposes. Any 
one can injure or destroy his private enemy by 
injuring an effigy of him, just as any one can injure 
or destroy his enemy by assaulting and wounding 
him. But though any one may do this, it is felt 



MAGIC 8l 

that no one ought to do it. Such practices are 
condemned by public opinion. Further, as they 
are condemned by the community, they are ipso 
facto offensive to the god of the community. To 
him only those prayers can be offered, and by him 
only those practices can be approved, which are 
not injurious to the community or are not felt by 
the community to be injurious. That is the reason 
why such practices are condemned by the religious 
as well as by the moral feeling of the community. 
And they are condemned by religion and morality 
long before their futility is exposed by science or 
recognised by common sense. When they are 
felt to be futile, there is no call upon religion or 
morality especially to condemn the practices — 
though the intention and the will to injure our 
fellow-man remains offensive both to morality 
and religion. With the means adopted for realising 
the will and carrying out the intention, morality 
and religion have no concern. If the same or 
similar means can be used for purposes consistent 
with the common weal, they do not, so far as they 
are used for such purposes, come under the ban 
of either morality or religion. Therein we have, I 
suggest, the reason of a certain confusion of thought 



82 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

in the minds of students of the science of religion. 
We of the present day look at the means employed. 
We see the same means employed for ends that are, 
and for ends that are not, antisocial ; and, inasmuch 
as the means are the same and are alike irrational, 
we group them all together under the head of magic. 
The grouping is perfectly correct, inasmuch as the 
proceedings grouped together have the common at- 
tribute of being proceedings which cannot possibly 
produce the effects which those who employ them 
believe that they will and do produce. But this 
grouping becomes perfectly misleading, if we go 
on to infer, as is sometimes inferred, that primitive 
man adopted it. First, it is based on the fact that 
the proceedings are uniformly irrational — a fact 
of which man is at first wholly unaware ; and which, 
when it begins to dawn upon him, presents itself 
in the form of the further error that while some of 
these proceedings are absurd, others are not. In 
neither case does he adopt the modern, scientific 
position that all are irrational, impossible, absurd. 
Next, the modern position deals only with the pro- 
ceedings as means, — declaring them all absurd, — 
and overlooks entirely what is to primitive man the 
point of fundamental importance, viz. the object 



MAGIC 83 

and purpose with which they are used. Yet it is 
the object and purpose which determine the social 
value of these proceedings. For him, or in his 
eyes, to class together the things which he approves 
of and the things of which he disapproves would 
be monstrous: the means employed in the two 
cases may be the same, but that is of no importance 
in face of the fact that the ends aimed at in the 
two cases are not merely different but contradictory. 
In the one case the object promotes the common 
weal, or is supposed by him to promote it. In the 
other it is destructive of the common weal. 

If, therefore, we wish to avoid confusion of thought, 
we must in discussing magic constantly bear in 
mind that we group together — and therefore are 
in danger of confusing — things which to the savage 
differ toto caelo from one another. A step towards 
avoiding this confusion is taken by Dr. Frazer, 
when he distinguishes (History of the Kingship, 
p. 89) between private magic and public magic. 
The distinction is made still more emphatic by 
Dr. Haddon (Magic and Fetichism, p. 20) when 
he speaks of " nefarious magic." The very same 
means when employed against the good of the 
community are regarded, by morality and religion 



84 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

alike, as nefarious, which when employed for the 
good of the community are regarded with approval. 
The very same illegitimate application, — I mean 
logically illegitimate in our eyes, -—the very same 
application of the principle that like produces like 
will be condemned by the public opinion of the 
community when it is employed for purposes of 
murder and praised by public opinion when it is 
employed to produce the rain which the community 
desires. The distinction drawn by primitive man 
between the two cases is that, though any one can 
use the means to do either, no one ought to do the 
one which the community condemns. That is con- 
demned as nefarious ; and because it is nefarious, 
the " witch" may be "smelled out" by the "witch- 
doctor" and destroyed by, or with the approval of, 
the community. 

But though that is, I suggest, the first stage in the 
process by which the belief in magic is evolved, it is 
by no means the whole of the process. Indeed, 
it may fairly be urged that practices which any one 
can perform, though no one ought to perform, may 
be nefarious (as simple, straightforward murder 
is), but so far there is nothing magical about them. 
And I am prepared to accept that view. Indeed, 



MAGIC 85 

it is an essential part of my argument, for I seek to 
show that the belief in magic had a beginning and 
was evolved out of something that was not a belief 
in magic, though it gave rise to it. The belief that 
like produces like can be entertained where magic 
has not so much as been heard of. And, though 
it may ultimately be worked out into the scientific 
position that the sum of conditions necessary to 
produce an effect is indistinguishable from the 
effect, it may also be worked out on other lines 
into a belief in magic; and the first step in that 
evolution is taken when the belief that like pro- 
duces like is used for purposes pronounced by 
public opinion to be nefarious. 

The next step is taken when it comes to be be- 
lieved not only that the thing is nefarious but that 
not every one can do it. The reason why only 
a certain person can do it may be that he alone 
knows how to do it — or he and the person from 
whom he learnt it. The lore of such persons when 
examined by folk-lore students is found generally to 
come under one or other of the two classes known 
as sympathetic and mimetic magic, or homoeo- 
pathic and contagious magic. In these cases it is 
obvious that the modus operandi is the same as it 



86 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

was in what I have called the first stage in the 
evolution of magic and have already described 
at great length. What differentiates this second 
stage from the first is that whereas in the first stage 
these applications of the principle that like produces 
like are known to every one, though not practised 
by every one, in the second stage these applications 
are not known to every one, but only to the dealers 
in magic. Some of those applications of the prin- 
ciple may be applications which have descended 
to the dealer and have passed out of the general 
memory; and others may simply be extensions 
of the principle which have been invented by the 
dealer or his teacher. Again, the public disap- 
proval of nefarious arts will tend first to segregate 
the followers of such arts from the rest of the com- 
munity ; and next to foster the notion that the arts 
thus segregated, and thereby made more or less 
mysterious, include not only things which the or- 
dinary decent member of society would not do if he 
could, but also things which he could not do if he 
would. The mere belief in the possibility of such 
arts creates an atmosphere of suspicion in which 
things are believed because they are impossible. 
When this stage has been reached, when he who 



MAGIC 87 

practises nefarious arts is reported and believed to 
do things which ordinary decent people could not 
do if they would, his personality inevitably comes 
to be considered as a factor in the results that he 
produces; he is credited with a power to produce 
them which other people, that is to say ordinary 
people, do not possess. And it is that personal 
power which eventually comes to be the most im- 
portant, because the most mysterious, article in 
his equipment. It is in virtue of that personal 
power that he is commonly believed to be able to 
do things which are impossible for the ordinary 
member of the tribe. 

Thus far I have been tracing the steps of the 
process by which the worker of nefarious arts starts 
by employing for nefarious purposes means which 
any one could use if he would, and ends by being 
credited with a power peculiar to himself of work- 
ing impossibilities. I now wish to point out that a 
process exactly parallel is simultaneously carried 
on by which arts beneficent to society are supposed 
to be evolved. Rain-making may be taken as an 
art socially beneficial. The modus operandi of 
rain-making appears in all cases to be based on the 
principle that like produces like; and to be in its 



88 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

nature a process which any one can carry out and 
which requires no mysterious art to effect and no 
mysterious personal power to produce. At the 
same time, as it is a proceeding which is beneficial 
to the tribe as a whole, it is one in which the whole 
tribe, and no one tribesman in particular, is inter- 
ested. It must be carried out in the interest of the 
tribe and by some one who in carrying it out acts 
for the tribe. The natural representative of the 
tribe is the head-man of the tribe; and, though 
any one might perform the simple actions necessary, 
and could perform them just as well as the head- 
man, they tend to fall into the hands of the head- 
man; and in any case the person who performs 
them performs them as the representative of the 
tribe. The natural inference comes in course of 
time to be drawn that he who alone performs them 
is the man who alone can perform them ; and when 
that inference is drawn it becomes obvious that his 
personality, or the power peculiar to him personally, 
is necessary if rain is to be made, and that the acts 
and ceremonies through which he goes and through 
which any one could go would not be efficacious, 
or not as efficacious, without his personal agency 
and mysterious power. Hence the man who works 



MAGIC 89 

wonders for his tribe or in the interests of his tribe, 
in virtue of his personal power, does things which 
are impossible for the ordinary member of the tribe. 
Up to this point, in tracing the evolution of magic, 
we have not found it once necessary to bring in or 
even to refer to any belief in the existence of spiritual 
beings of any kind. So far as the necessities of the 
argument are concerned, the belief in magic might 
have originated in the way I have described and 
might have developed on the lines suggested, in a 
tribe which had never so much as heard of spirits. 
Of course, as a matter of fact, every tribe in which 
the belief in magic is found does also believe in the 
existence of spirits; animism is a stage of belief 
lower than which or back of which science does 
not profess to go. But it is only in an advanced 
stage of its evolution that the belief in magic be- 
comes involved with the belief in spirits. Originally, 
eating tiger to make you bold, or eating saffron to 
cure jaundice, was just as matter of fact a proceeding 
as drinking water to moisten your throat or sitting 
by a fire to get warm; like produces like, and be- 
yond that obvious fact it was not necessary to go — 
there was no more need to imagine that the action 
of the saffron was due to a spirit than to imagine 



90 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

that it was a water spirit which slakes your thirst. 
The fact seems to be that animism is a savage 
philosophy which is competent to explain every- 
thing when called upon, but that the savage does 
not spend every moment of his waking life in in- 
voking it : until there is some need to fall back upon 
it, he goes on treating inanimate things as things 
which he can utilise for his own purposes without 
reference to spirits. That is the attitude also of 
the man who in virtue of his lore or his personal 
power can produce effects which the ordinary man 
cannot or will not: he performs his ceremony and 
the effect follows — or will follow — because he 
knows how to do it or has mysterious personal 
power to produce the effect. But he consults no 
spirits — at any rate in the first instance. Eventu- 
ally he may do so; and then magic enters on a 
further stage in its evolution. (See Appendix.) 

If the man who has the lore or the personal 
power, and who uses it for nefarious purposes, pro- 
poses to employ it on obtaining the same control 
over spirits as he has over things, his magic reaches 
a stage of evolution in which it is difficult and 
practically unnecessary to distinguish it from the 
stage of fetichism in which the owner of a fetich 



MAGIC 91 

applies coercion to make the fetich spirit do what 
he wishes. With fetichism I deal in another lecture. 
If, on the other hand, the man who has the lore 
or the personal power and uses it for social or "com- 
munal" purposes (Haddon, p. 41) comes to believe 
that, for the effects which he has hitherto sought 
to produce by means of his superior knowledge or 
superior power, it is necessary to invoke the aid 
of spirits, he will naturally address himself to the 
spirit or god who is worshipped by the community 
because he has at heart the general interests of the 
community; or it may be that the spirit who pro- 
duces such a benefit for the community at large, as 
rain for example, will take his place among the 
gods of the community as the rain-god, in virtue 
of the benefit which he confers upon the community 
generally. In either case, the attitude of the priest 
or person who approaches him on behalf of the 
community will be that which befits a supplicant 
invoking a favour from a power that has shown 
favour in the past to the community. And it will 
not surprise us if we find that the ceremonies which 
were used for the purpose of rain-making, before 
rain was recognised as the gift of the gods, continue 
for a time to be practised as the proper rites with 



92 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

which to approach the god of the community or 
the rain-god in particular. Such survivals are 
then in danger of being misinterpreted by students 
of the science of religion, for they may be regarded 
as evidence that religion was evolved out of magic, 
when in truth they show that religion tends to drive 
out magic. Thus Dr. Frazer, in his Lectures on 
the Early History of the Kingship (pp. 73-75), 
describes the practice of the New Caledonians who, 
to promote the growth of taro, "bury in the field 
certain stones resembling taros, praying to their 
ancestors at the same time," and he goes on to 
say: "In these practices of the New Caledonians 
the magical efficacy of the stones appears to be 
deemed insufficient of itself to accomplish the end 
in view ; it has to be reinforced by the spirits of the 
dead, whose help is sought by prayer and sacrifice. 
Thus in New Caledonia sorcery is blent with the 
worship of the dead ; in other words, magic is com- 
bined with religion. If the stones ceased to be em- 
ployed, and the prayers and sacrifices to the ancestors 
remained, the transition from magic to religion 
would be complete.' ' Thus it seems to be suggested 
in these words of Dr. Frazer's that religion may 
be evolved out of magic. If that is what is suggested, 



MAGIC 93 

then there is little doubt that the suggestion is not 
borne out by the instance given. Let us concede 
for the moment what some of us would be inclined 
to doubt, viz. that prayers and sacrifice offered to 
a human being, alive or dead, is religion; and let 
us enquire whether this form of religion is evolved 
out of magic. The magic here is quite clear : stones 
resembling taros are buried in the taro field to pro- 
mote the growth of taros. That is an application 
of the principle that like produces like which might 
be employed by men who had never heard of an- 
cestor worship or of any kind of religion, and who 
had never uttered prayers or offered sacrifices 
of any kind. Next, the religious element, accord- 
ing to Dr. Frazer, is also quite clear: it consists 
in offering sacrifices to the dead with the prayer 
or the words, "Here are your offerings, in order 
that the crop of yams may be good. ,, Now, it is 
not suggested, even by Dr. Frazer, that this religious 
element is a form of magic or is in any way developed 
out of or evolved from magic. On the contrary, if 
this element is religious — indeed, whether it be 
really religious or not — it is obviously entirely 
distinct and different from sympathetic or homoeo- 
pathic magic. The mere fact that the magical 



94 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

rite of burying in the taro fields stones which re- 
semble taros has to be supplemented by rites which 
are, on Dr. Frazer's own showing, non-magical, 
shows that the primitive belief in this application 
of the principle that like produces like was already 
dying out, and was in process of becoming a mere 
survival. Suppose that it died out entirely and 
the rite of burying stones became an unintelligible 
survival, or was dropped altogether, and suppose 
that the prayers and sacrifices remained in possession 
of the field, which would be the more correct way 
of stating the facts, to say that the magic had died 
out and its place had been taken by something 
totally different, viz. religion; or that what was 
magic had become religion, that magic and religion 
are but two manifestations, two stages, in the evolu- 
tion of the same principle? The latter statement 
was formally rejected by Dr. Frazer in the second 
edition of his Golden Bough, when he declared that 
he had come to recognise "a fundamental distinc- 
tion and even opposition of principle between magic 
and religion" (Preface, xvi). His words, therefore, 
justify us in assuming that when he speaks, in his 
Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, of 
the " transition from magic to religion," he cannot 



MAGIC 95 

mean that magic becomes religion, or that religion 
is evolved out of magic, for the " distinction and 
even opposition of principle" between the two is 
" fundamental." He can, therefore, only mean that 
magic is followed and may be driven out by some- 
thing which is fundamentally opposed to it, viz. 
religion. 

What then is the fundamental opposition between 
magic and religion? and is it such as to require us 
to believe with Dr. Frazer that magic preceded 
religion, and that of two opposite ideas the mind 
can conceive the one without conceiving — and 
rejecting — the other? 

The fundamental opposition between magic and 
religion I take to be that religion is supposed to 
promote the interests of the community, and that 
magic, so far forth as it is nefarious, is condemned 
by the moral and by the religious feeling of the 
community. It is the ends for which nefarious 
magic is used that are condemned, and not the 
means. The means may be and, as we see, are 
silly and futile; and, for intellectual progress, their 
silliness and futility must be recognised by the 
intellect. But, it is only when they are used for 
purposes inimical to the public good that they are 



96 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

condemned by religion and morality as nefarious. 
If therefore we talk of a fundamental opposition 
between magic and religion, we must understand 
that the fundamental opposition is that between 
nefarious magic and religion; neither religion nor 
morality condemns the desire to increase the food 
supply or to promote any other interest of the com- 
munity. Whether a man uses skill that he has 
acquired, or personal power, or force of will, matters 
not, provided he uses it for the general good. The 
question whether, as a cold matter of fact, the means 
he uses are efficacious is not one which moral fervour 
or religious ardour is competent by itself to settle: 
the cool atmosphere and dry light of reason have 
rather that function to perform; and they have to 
perform it in the case both of means that are used 
for the general good and of those used against it. 

I take it therefore that what religion is funda- 
mentally opposed to is magic — or anything else — 
that is used for nefarious purposes. 

The question then arises whether we have any 
reason to believe that magic used for nefarious 
purposes must have existed before religion. Now 
by nefarious purposes I mean purposes incon- 
sistent with or destructive of the common good. 



MAGIC 97 

There can be no such purposes, however, unless and 
until there is a community, however small, having 
common interests and a common good. As soon as 
there exists such a community, there will be a dis- 
tinction between actions which promote and actions 
which are destructive of the common good. The 
one class will be approved, the other disapproved, 
of by public opinion. Magic will be approved 
and disapproved of according as it is or is not used 
in a way inconsistent with the public good. If 
there is a spirit or a god w T ho is worshipped by the 
community because he is believed to be concerned 
with the good of the community, then he will dis- 
approve of nefarious proceedings whether magical 
or not. But Dr. Frazer's position I take to be 
that no such spirit or god can come to be believed 
in, unless there has been previously a belief in magic. 
Now, that argument either is or is not based on the 
assumption that magic and religion are but two 
manifestations, two stages, in the evolution of the 
same principle. If that is the basis, then what 
manifested itself at first as magic subsequently 
manifests itself as religion; and "the transition 
from magic to religion" implies the priority of 
magic to religion. But, as we have seen, Dr. Frazer 

H 



98 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

formally postulates, not an identity, but an " op- 
position of principle " between the two. We must 
therefore reject the assumption of an identity of 
principle; and accept the " opposition of principle." 
But if so, then there must be two principles which 
are opposed to one another, religion and magic; 
and we might urge that line of argument consistently 
enough to show that there can be no magic save 
where there is religion to be opposed to it. 

Now, there is an opposition of principle between 
magic used for nefarious purposes and religion; 
and the opposition is that the one promotes social 
and the other anti-social purposes. Nefarious 
purposes, whether worked by magic or by other 
means, are condemned by religion and are nefarious 
especially because offensive to the god who has the 
interests of the community at heart. That from 
the moment society existed anti-social tendencies 
also manifested themselves will not be doubted; 
and neither need we doubt that the principle that 
like produces like was employed from the beginning 
for social as well as for anti-social purposes. The 
question is whether, in the stage of animism, the 
earliest and the lowest stage which science recognises 
in the evolution of man, there is ever found a society 



MAGIC 99 

of human beings which has not appropriated some 
one or more of the spirits by which all things, on 
the animistic principle, are worked, to the purposes 
of the community. No such society has yet been 
proved to exist; still less has any a priori proof 
been produced to show that such a society must 
have existed. The presumption indeed is rather 
the other way. Children go through a period of 
helpless infancy longer than the young of any other 
creatures ; and could not reach the age of self-help, 
if the family did not hold together for some years 
at least. But where there is a family there is a 
society, even if it be confined to members of the 
family. There also, therefore, there are social and 
anti-social tendencies and purposes; and, in the 
animistic stage, the spirits, by which man conceives 
himself to be surrounded, are either hostile or not 
hostile to the society, and are accordingly either 
worshipped or not worshipped by it. Doubtless, 
even in those early times, the father and the hus- 
band conceived himself to be the whole family ; and 
if that view had its unamiable side — and it still 
has — it also on occasion had the inestimable 
advantage of sinking self, of self-sacrifice, in defence 
of the family. 



IOO COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Thus far I have been concerned to show how, 
starting from a principle such as that like produces 
like, about which there is nothing magical in the 
eyes either of those who believe in magic or of those 
who have left the belief behind, man might evolve 
the conception of magic as being the lore or the 
personal power which enables a man to do what 
ordinary people cannot do. A few words are neces- 
sary as to the decline of the belief. The first is that 
the belief is rotten before it is ripe. Those applica- 
tions of the principle that like produces like which 
are magical are generally precisely those which are 
false. The fact that they are false has not prevented 
them from surviving in countless numbers to the 
present day. But some suspicion of their falsity 
in some cases does arise; and the person who has 
the most frequent opportunities of discovering their 
falsity, the person on whose notice the discovery of 
their falsity is thrust most pointedly, is the person 
who deals habitually and professionally in magic. 
Hence, though it is his profession to work wonders, 
he takes care as far as may be not to attempt im- 
possibilities. Thus Dr. Haddon (I.e., p. 62) found 
that the men of Murray Island, Torres Straits, who 
made a "big wind" by magic, only made it in the 



MAGIC IOI 

season of the southeast trade wind. "On my ask- 
ing," he says, "whether the ceremony was done in 
the north monsoon, my informant said emphatically, 
' Can't do it in northwest.' That is, the charm is 
performed only at that season of the year when the 
required result is possible — indeed when it is of 
normal occurrence. In this, as in other cases, I 
found that the impossible was never attempted. A 
rain charm would not be made when there was no 
expectation of rain coming, or a southeast wind be 
raised during the wrong season." The instance 
thus given to us by Dr. Haddon shows how the 
belief in magic begins to give way before the scien- 
tific observation of fact. The collapse of magic 
becomes complete when every one sees that the 
southeast trade wind blows at its appointed time, 
whether the magic rites are performed or not. In 
fine, what kills magic regarded as a means for pro- 
ducing effects is the discovery that it is superfluous, 
when for instance the desired wind or rain is coming, 
and futile when it is not. And whereas morality and 
religion only condemn the end aimed at by magic, 
and only condemn it when it is anti-social, science 
slowly shows that magic as a means to any end is 
superfluous and silly. 



102 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Science, however, shows this but slowly; and if 
we wish to understand how it is that the belief in 
the magician's power has survived for thousands of 
years down to the present moment amongst nu- 
merous peoples, we must remember that his equip- 
ment and apparatus are not limited to purely non- 
sensical notions. On the contrary, in his stock of 
knowledge, carefully handed down, are many truths 
and facts not generally known; and they are the 
most efficacious articles of his stock in trade. Dr. 
Frazer may not go farther than his argument requires, 
but he certainly goes farther than the facts will 
support him, when he says (I.e., p. 83) "for it must 
always be remembered that every single profession 
and claim put forward by the magician as such is 
false; not one of them can be maintained without 
deception, conscious or unconscious." 

If now, in conclusion, we look once more at the 
subject of magic and look at it from the practical 
point of view of the missionary, we shall see that 
there are several conclusions which may be of use 
to him. In the first place, his attitude to magic will 
be hostile, and in his hostility to it he will find the 
best starting-point for his campaign against it to be 
in the fact that everywhere magic is felt, to a greater 



MAGIC IO3 

or less extent, to be anti-social, and is condemned 
both by the moral sentiments and the religious 
feeling of the community. It is felt to be essentially 
wicked; and in warring against it the missionary 
will be championing the cause of those who know it 
to be wrong but who simply dare not defy it. The 
fact that defiance is not ventured on is essential to 
the continuance of the tyranny; and what is neces- 
sary, if it is to be defied, is an actual concrete example 
of the fact that when defied it is futile. 

Next, where magic is practised for social purposes, 
where it mimics science or religion and survives in 
virtue of its power of " protective colouring," it is in 
fact superfluous and silly; and where the natives 
themselves are beginning to recognise that the magic 
which is supposed, for instance, to raise the southeast 
trade wind won't act at the wrong season, it should 
not be difficult to get them to see that it is unneces- 
sary at the right season. The natural process which 
tends thus to get rid of magic may be accelerated 
by the sensible missionary; and some knowledge of 
science will be found in this, as in other matters, an 
indispensable part of his training. 

Finally, the missionary may rest assured in the 
conviction that his flank will not be turned by the 



104 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

science of religion. The idea that religion was 
preceded by and evolved out of magic may have been 
entertained by some students of the science of reli- 
gion in the past, and may not yet have been thrown 
off by all. But it holds no place now in the science 
of religion. To derive either science or religion 
from the magic which exists only by mimicking one 
or the other is just as absurd as to imagine that the 
insect which imitates the colour of the leaf whereon 
it lives precedes and creates the tree which is to 
support it. 



FETICHISM 

The line of action taken by the missionary at 
work will, like that of any other practical man, be 
conditioned, not only by the object which he wishes 
to attain, but also by the nature of the material on 
which and with which he has to work. He requires 
therefore all the information which the science of 
religion can place at his disposal about the beliefs 
and practices of those amongst whom his work is 
cast; and, if he is to make practical use of that 
information, he must know not only that certain 
beliefs and practices do as a matter of fact obtain, 
he must know also what is their value for his special 
purpose — what, if any, are the points about them 
which have religious value, and can be utilized by 
him; and what are those points about them which 
are obstructive to his purpose, and how best they 
may be removed and counteracted. To supply him 
with this information, to give him this estimate of 
values, to guide him as to the attitude he should 
assume and the way in which he may utilise or must 

105 



106 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

attack native practices and beliefs, is the object 
with which the applied science of religion, when it 
has been constituted by the action of Hartford 
Theological Seminary, will address itself. 

Now, it may seem from the practical point of view 
of the missionary that with regard to fetichism 
there can be no question as to what its value is or 
as to what his attitude should be towards it. But, 
even if we should ultimately find that fetichism is 
obstructive to religion, we shall still want to know 
what hints we can extract from the science of 
religion as to the best way of cutting at the roots of 
fetichism ; and therefore it will be necessary to con- 
sider what exactly fetichism is. And, as a matter of 
fact, there is a tendency manifesting itself amongst 
students of the science of religion to say, as Dr. 
Haddon says (Magic and Fetichism, p. 91), that 
" fetichism is a stage of religious development"; 
and amongst writers on the philosophy of religion 
to take fetichism and treat it, provisionally at any 
rate, if not as the primitive religion of mankind, then 
as that form of religion which "we find amongst 
men at the lowest stage of development known to 
us" (Hoffding, Philosophy of Religion, E. T., §§ 45, 
46). If, then, fetichism is the primitive religion of 



FETICHISM 107 

mankind or a stage of religious development, "a 
basis from which many other modes of religious 
thought have been developed" (Haddon, p. 91), it will 
have a value which the missionary must recognise. 
And in any case he must know what value, if any, it 
has. 

Now, if we are, I will not say to do justice to the 
view that fetichism is the primitive religion of man- 
kind or a stage from which other modes of religious 
thought have been developed, but if we are simply 
to understand it, we must clearly distinguish it from 
the view — somewhat paradoxical to say the least 
— that fetichism has no religious value, and yet is 
the source of all religious values. The inference 
which may legitimately be drawn from this second 
view is that all forms of religious thought, having 
been evolved from this primitive religion of man- 
kind, have precisely the same value as it has ; they 
do but make explicit what it really was ; the history 
of religion does but write large and set out at length 
what was contained in it from the first ; in fetichism 
we see what from the first religion was, and what at 
the last religion is. On this view, the source from 
which all religious values spring is fetichism ; fetich- 
ism has no value of any kind, and therefore the 



108 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

evolved forms of fetichism which we call forms of 
religion have no value either of any kind. Thus, 
science — the science of religion — is supposed to 
demonstrate by scientific methods the real nature 
and the essential character of all religion. 

Now, the error in this reasoning proceeds partly 
on a false conception of the object and method of 
science — a false conception which is slowly but 
surely disappearing. The object of all science, 
whether it be physical science or other, whether it 
be historic science or other, is to establish facts. 
The object of the historic science of religion is to 
record the facts of the history of religion in such a 
way that the accuracy of the record as a record will 
be disputed by no one qualified to judge the fact. 
For that purpose, it abstains deliberately and con- 
sistently from asking or considering the religious 
value of any of the facts with which it deals. It has 
not to consider, and does not consider, what would 
have been, still less what ought to have been, the 
course of history, but simply what it was. In this 
it is following merely the dictates of common sense ; 
before we can profitably express an opinion on any 
occurrence, we must know what exactly it was that 
occurred; and to learn what occurred we must 



FETICHISM IO9 

divest our minds of preconceptions. It is the busi- 
ness of the science of religion to set aside precon- 
ceptions as to whether religion has or has not any 
value; and if it does set them aside, that is to say 
so far as it is scientific, it will end as it began without 
touching on the question of the value of religion. In 
fine, it is, and would I think now be generally ad- 
mitted to be, a misconception of the function of the 
science of religion to imagine that it does, or can, 
prove anything as to the truth of religion, one way 
or the other. 

There is, however, another error in the reasoning 
which is directed to show that in fetichism we see 
what religion was and essentially is. That error 
consists not only in a false conception of what reli- 
gion is, — the man who has himself no religion may 
be excused if he fails to understand fully what it is, — 
it is based on a misunderstanding of what fetichism 
is. And so confusion is doubly confounded. The 
source of that misunderstanding is to be found in 
Bosman (Pinkerton, Voyages and Travels, London, 
1814, XVI, 493), who says: "I once asked a negro 
with whom I could talk very freely . . . how they 
celebrated their divine worship, and what number 
of gods they had; he, laughing, answered that I had 



IIO COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

puzzled him; and assured me that nobody in the 
whole country could give me an exact account of it. 
'For, as for my own part, I have a very large num- 
ber of gods, and doubt not but that others have as 
many. For any of us being resolved to undertake 
anything of importance, we first of all search out 
a god to prosper our designed undertaking; and 
going out of doors with the design, take the first 
creature that presents itself to our eyes, whether 
dog, cat, or the most contemptible creature in the 
world for our god ; or, perhaps, instead of that, any 
inanimate that falls in our way, whether a stone, a 
piece of wood, or anything else of the same nature. 
This new-chosen god is immediately presented with 
an offering, which is accompanied by a solemn vow, 
that if it pleaseth him to prosper our undertakings, 
for the future we will always worship and esteem 
him as a god. If our design prove successful, we 
have discovered a new and assisting god, which is 
daily presented with a fresh offering ; but if the con- 
trary happen, the new god is rejected as a useless 
tool, and consequently returns to his primitive 
estate. We make and break our gods daily, and 
consequently are the masters and inventors of what 
we sacrifice to.'" Now, all this was said by the 



FETICHISM III 

negro, as Bosman himself observed, to " ridicule his 
own country gods." And it is not surprising that it 
should have been, or should be, accepted as a trust- 
worthy description of the earliest form of religion by 
those who in the highest form can find no more than 
this negro found in fetichism when he wished to 
ridicule it. 

Let us hold over for the moment the question 
whether fetichism is or is not a form of religion; 
and let us enquire how far the account given by Bos- 
man's negro accords with the facts. First, though 
there is no doubt that animals are worshipped as 
gods, and though there is no doubt that the guardian 
spirits of individuals are chosen, or are supposed to 
manifest themselves, for example, amongst the North 
American Indians, in animal form, and that "the 
first creature that presents itself" to the man seek- 
ing the manifestation of his guardian spirit may be 
taken to be his god, even though it be "the most 
contemptible creature in the world " ; still students of 
the science of religion are fairly satisfied that such 
gods or guardian spirits are not to be confused with 
fetiches. A fetich is an inanimate or lifeless object, 
even if it is the feather, claw, bone, eyeball, or any 
other part of an animal or even of a man. It is as 



112 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Bosnian's negro said, "any inanimate that falls in 
our way." When he goes on to say that it "is im- 
mediately presented with an offering,' ' and, so long 
as its owner believes in it, "is daily presented with 
a fresh offering," he is stating a fact that is beyond 
dispute, and which is fully recognised by all stu- 
dents. A typical instance is given by Professor 
Tylor (Primitive Culture, II, 158) of the owner of 
a stone which had been taken as a fetich: "He was 
once going out on important business, but crossing 
the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt himself. 
Ha! ha! thought he, art thou there? So he took 
the stone, and it helped him through his undertaking 
for days." When Bosman's negro further goes on 
to state that if the fetich is discovered by its owner 
not to prosper his undertakings, as he expected it to 
do, "it is rejected as a useless tool," he makes a 
statement which is admitted to be true and which, 
in its truth, may be understood to mean that when 
the owner finds that the object is not a fetich, he casts 
it aside as being nothing but the "inanimate" which 
it is. Bosman's negro, however, says not that the 
inanimate but that "the new god is rejected as a 
useless tool." That we must take as being but a 
carelessness of expression; the evidence of Colonel 



FETICHISM 113 

Ellis, an observer whose competence is undoubted, 
is: "Every native with whom I have conversed on 
the subject has laughed at the possibility of it being 
supposed that he could worship or offer sacrifice 
to some such object as a stone, which of itself would 
be perfectly obvious to his senses was a stone only 
and nothing more" (The Tshi-s peaking Peoples, 
p. 192). From these words it follows that the object 
worshipped as a fetich is a stone (or whatever it is) 
and something more, and that the object " rejected 
as a useless tool" is a stone (or whatever it is) and 
nothing more. When, then, Bosnian's negro goes 
on to say, "we make and break our gods daily," 
he is not describing accurately the processes as they 
are conceived by those who perform them. The 
fetich worshipper believes that the object which 
arrests his attention has already the powers which 
he ascribes to it; and it is in consequence of that 
belief that he takes it as his fetich. ' And it is only 
when he is convinced that it is not a fetich that he 
rejects it as a useless tool. But what Bosnian's 
negro suggests, and apparently intended to suggest, 
is that the fetich worshipper makes, say, a stone 
his god, knowing that it is a stone and nothing more ; 
and that he breaks his fetich believing it to be a god. 



114 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Thus the worshipper knows that the object is no god 
when he is worshipping it; but believes it to be a 
god when he rejects it as a useless tool. Now that is, 
consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or not, a 
misrepresentation of fetichism; and it is precisely 
on that misconception of what fetichism is that they 
base themselves who identify religion with fetichism, 
and then argue that, as fetichism has no value, reli- 
gious or reasonable, neither has religion itself. 

Returning now to the question what fetichism is 
— a question which must be answered before we 
can enquire what religious value it possesses, and 
whether it can be of any use for the practical pur- 
poses of the missionary in his work — we have now 
seen that a fetich is not merely an "inanimate," 
but something more; and that an object to become 
regarded as a fetich must attract the attention of 
the man who is to adopt it, and must attract the 
attention of the man when he has business on hand, 
that is to say when he has some end in view which 
he desires to attain, or generally when he is in a 
state of expectancy. The process of choice is one 
of "natural selection." Professor Hoffding sees 
in it "the simplest conceivable construction of 
religious ideas. The choice is entirely elementary 



FETICHISM 115 

and involuntary, as elementary and involuntary as 
the exclamation which is the simplest form of a 
judgment of worth. The object chosen must be 
something or other which is closely bound up 
with whatever engrosses the mind. It perhaps 
awakens memories of earlier events in which 
it was present or cooperative, or else it pre- 
sents a certain — perhaps a very distant — similarity 
to objects which helped in previous times of need. 
Or it may be merely the first object which presents 
itself in a moment of strained expectation. It 
attracts attention, and is therefore involuntarily 
associated with what is about to happen, with the 
possibility of attaining the desired end" (Philosophy 
of Religion, E. T., p. 139). And then Professor 
Hoffding goes on to say, "In such phenomena as 
these we encounter religion under the guise of de- 
sire." Now, without denying that there are such 
things as religious desires — and holding as we do 
that religion is the search after God and the yearn- 
ing of the human heart after Him, "the desire 
of all nations," we shall have no temptation to 
deny that there are such things as religious desires 
— yet we must for the moment reserve our decision 
on the question whether it is in such phenomena 



/ 



Il6 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

as these that we encounter religious desires, and 
we must bear in mind that there are desires which 
are not religious, and that we want to know whether 
it is in the phenomena of fetichism that we encounter 
religious desires. 

That in the phenomena of fetichism we encounter 
desires other than religious is beyond dispute: the 
use of a fetich is, as Dr. Nassau says, "to aid the 
possessor in the accomplishment of some specific 
wish" {Fetichism in West Africa, p. 82) ; that is, of 
any specific wish. Now, a fetich is, as we have seen, 
an inanimate object and something more. What 
more ? In actual truth, nothing more than the fact 
that it is "involuntarily associated with what is 
about to happen, with the possibility of attaining 
the desired end." But to the possessor the some- 
thing more, it may be said, is the fact that it is not 
merely an "inanimate" but also a spirit, or the habi- 
tation of a spiritual being. When, however, we 
reflect that fetichism goes back to the animistic 
stage of human thought, in which all the things that 
we term inanimate are believed to be animated by 
spirits, it is obvious that we require some differentia 
to mark off those things (animated by spirits) which 
are fetiches from those things (animated by spirits) 



FETICHISM 117 

which are not. And the differentia is, of course, 
that fetiches are spirits, or objects animated by- 
spirits, which will aid the possessor in the accom- 
plishment of some specific wish, and are thought 
to be willing so to aid, owing to the fact that by an 
involuntary association of ideas they become con- 
nected in the worshipper's mind with the possibility 
of attaining the end he has in view at the moment. 
To recognise fetichism, then, in its simplest if not 
in its most primitive form, all we need postulate is 
animism — the belief that all things are animated 
by spirits — and the process of very natural selection 
which has already been described. At this stage 
in the history of fetichism it is especially difficult 
to judge whether the fetich is the spirit or the object 
animated by the spirit. As Dr. Haddon says (p. 83), 
"Just as the human body and soul form one in- 
dividual, so the material object and its occupying 
spirit or power form one individual, more vague, 
perhaps, but still with many attributes distinctively 
human. It possesses personality and will ... it 
possesses most of the human passions, — anger, re- 
venge, also generosity and gratitude; it is within 
reach of influence and may be benevolent, hence to 
be deprecated and placated, and its aid enlisted." 



Il8 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

A more advanced stage in the history of fetichism 
is that which is reached by reflection on the fact 
that a fetich not unfrequently ceases to prosper the 
undertakings of its possessor in the way he expected 
it to do. On the principles of animism, everything 
that is — whether animate, or inanimate according 
to our notions — is made up of spirit, or soul, and 
body. In the case of man, when he dies, the spirit 
leaves the body. When, therefore, a fetich ceases to 
act, the explanation by analogy is that the spirit 
has left the body, the inanimate, with which it was 
originally associated; and when that is the case, 
then, as we learn from Miss Kingsley (Travels in 
West Africa, pp. 304-305), "the little thing you kept 
the spirit in is no more use now, and only fit to sell 
to a white man as 'a big curio.'" The fact that, 
in native belief, what we call an inanimate thing may 
lose its soul and become really dead is shown by 
Miss Kingsley in a passage quoted by Dr. Haddon : 
"Everything that he," the native, "knows by means 
of his senses he regards as a twofold entity — part 
spirit, part not spirit, or, as we should say, matter; 
the connection of a certain spirit with a certain mass 
of matter, he holds, is not permanent. He will 
point out to you a lightning-struck tree, and tell 



FETICHISM 119 

you its spirit has been broken ; he will tell you when 
the cooking-pot has been broken, that it has lost 
its spirit" (Folk-Lore, VIII, 141). We might safely 
infer then that as any object may lose its spirit, so too 
may an object which has been chosen as a fetich; 
even if we had not, as we have, direct testimony 
to the belief. 

Next, when it is believed that an object may lose 
its spirit and become dead indeed, there is room and 
opportunity for the belief to grow that its spirit may 
pass into some other object: that there may be 
a transmigration of spirits. And when this belief 
arises, a fresh stage in the history of fetichism is 
evolved. And the fresh stage is evolved in accord- 
ance with the law that governs the whole evolution 
of fetichism. That law is that a fetich is an object 
believed to aid its possessor in attaining the end he 
desires. In the earliest stage of its history anything 
which happens to arrest a man's attention when he 
is in a state of expectancy "is involuntarily associated 
with what is about to happen," and so becomes a 
fetich. In the most developed stage of fetichism, 
men are not content to wait until they stumble across 
a fetich, and when they do so to say, "Ha! ha! art 
thou there?" Their mental attitude becomes in- 



120 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

terrogative: "Ha! ha! where art thou?" They 
no longer wait to stumble across a fetich, they pro- 
ceed to make one; and for that procedure a belief 
in the transmigration of spirits is essential. An 
object, a habitation for the spirit, is prepared; and 
he is invited, conjured, or cdnjured, into it. If he 
is conjiired into it, the attitude of the man who 
invites him is submissive; if cdnjured, the mental 
attitude of the performer is one of superiority. 
Colonel Ellis throughout all his careful enquiries 
found that "so great is the fear of giving possible 
offence to any superhuman agent " that (in the region 
of his observation) we may well believe that even the 
makers of fetiches did not assume to command the 
spirits. But elsewhere, in other regions, it is im- 
possible to doubt but that the owners of fetiches 
not only conjure the spirits into the objects, but also 
apply coercion to them when they fail to aid their 
possessor in the accomplishment of his wishes. 
That, I take it, is the ultimate stage in the evolution, 
the fine flower, of fetichism. And it is not religion, 
it has no value as religion, or rather its value is anti- 
religious. Even if we were to accept as a definition 
of religion that it is the conciliation of beings con- 
ceived to be superior, we should be compelled by 



FETICHISM 121 

the definition to say that fetichism in its eventual 
outcome is not religion, for the attitude of the owner 
towards his fetich is then one of superiority, and his 
method is, when conciliation fails, to apply coer- 
cion. 

But it may perhaps be argued that fetichism, ex- 
cept in what I have termed its ultimate evolution, is 
religion and has religious value; or, to put it other- 
wise, that what I have represented as the eventual 
outcome is really a perversion or the decline of 
fetichism. Then, in the fetichism which is or rep- 
resents the primitive religion of mankind we meet, 
according to Professor Ho ff ding, " religion under 
the guise of desire." Now, not all desires are 
religious; and the question, which is purely a ques- 
tion of fact, arises whether the desires which fetich- 
ism subserves are religious. And in using the word 
"religious" I will not here place any extravagant 
meaning on the word ; I will take it in the meaning 
which would be understood by the community in 
which the owner of a fetich dwells himself. In 
the tribes described by Colonel Ellis, for instance, 
there are worshipped personal gods having proper 
names ; and the worship is served by duly appointed 
priests; and the worshippers consist of a body of 



122 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

persons whose welfare the god has at heart. Such 
are some of the salient features of what all students 
of the science of religion would include under the 
head of the religion of those tribes. Now amongst 
those same tribes the fetich, or suhman, as it is termed 
by them, is found; and there are several features 
which make a fetich quite distinguishable from any 
of the gods which are worshipped there. Thus, the 
fetich has no body of worshippers: it is the pri- 
vate property of its owner, who alone makes offer- 
ings to it. Its raison d'etre, its special and only 
function, is to subserve the private wishes of its 
owner. In so far as he makes offerings to it he may 
be called its priest; but he is not, as in the case of 
the priests of the gods who are worshipped there, 
the representative of the community or congregation, 
for a fetich has no plurality of worshippers; and 
none of the priests of the gods will have anything to 
do with it. Next," though offerings are made to the 
suhman by its owner, they are made in private" 
( Jevons, History of Religion, p. 165) — there is no 
public worship — and "public opinion does not ap- 
prove of them." The interests and the desires which 
the fetich exists to promote are not those of the com- 
munity: they are antisocial, for, as Colonel Ellis 



FETICHISM 123 

tells us, "one of the special attributes of a suhman 
is to procure the death of any person whom its 
worshipper may wish to have removed" — indeed 
"the most important function of the suhman appears 
to be to work evil against those who have injured or 
offended its worshipper." 

Thus, a very clear distinction exists between the 
worship of a fetich and the worship of the gods. 
It is not merely that the fetich is invoked occasionally 
in aid of antisocial desires: nothing can prevent 
the worshipper of a god, if the worshipper be bad 
enough, from praying for that which he ought not 
to pray for. It is that the gods of the community 
are there to sanction and further all desires which 
are for the good of the community, and that the 
fetich is there to further desires which are not for 
the good of the community, — hence it is that 
"public opinion does not approve of them." At 
another stage of religious evolution, it becomes 
apparent and is openly pronounced that neither does 
the god of the community approve of them; and 
then fetichism, like the sin of witchcraft, is stamped 
out more or less. But amongst the tribes who have 
only reached the point of religious progress attained 
by the natives of West Africa, public opinion has 



124 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

only gone so far as to express disapproval, not to 
declare war. 

If, then, we are to hold to the view of Professor 
Hoffding and of Dr. Haddon, that fetichism is in 
its essence, or was at the beginning, religious in its 
nature, though it may be perverted into something 
non-religious or anti-religious, we must at any rate 
admit that it has become non-religious not only in 
the case of those fetichists who assume an attitude 
of superiority and command to their fetiches, but 
also in the earlier stage of evolution when the 
fetichist preserves an attitude of submission and 
conciliation towards his fetich, but assumes the atti- 
tude only for the purpose of realising desires which 
are anti-social and recognised to be anti-religious. 

But, if we take — as I think we must take — 
that line of argument, the conclusion to which it 
will bring us is fairly clear and is not far off. The 
differentia or rather that differentia which character- 
istically marks off the fetich from the god is the 
nature of the desires which each exists to promote; 
the function which each exists to fulfil, the end 
which is there for each to subserve. But the ends 
are different. Not only are they different, they are 
antagonistic. And the process of evolution does 



FETICHISM 125 

but bring out the antagonism, it does not create it. 
It was there from the beginning. From the moment 
there was society, there were desires which could 
only be realised at the cost and to the loss of society, 
as well as desires in the realisation of which the good 
of society was realised. The assistance of powers 
other than human might be sought ; and the nature 
of the power which was sought was determined by 
the end or purpose for which its aid was employed 
or invoked — if for the good of society, it was ap- 
proved by society; if not, not. Its function, the 
end it subserved, determined its value for society — 
determined whether public opinion should approve 
or disapprove of it, whether it was a god of the com- 
munity or the fetich of an individual. Society can 
only exist where there is a certain community of 
purpose among its members ; and can only continue 
to exist where anti-social tendencies are to some 
extent suppressed or checked by force of public 
opinion. 

Fetichism, then, in its tendency and in its purpose, 
in the function which it performs and the end at 
which it aims is not only distinguishable from reli- 
gion, it is antagonistic to it, from the earliest period 
of its history to the latest. Religion is social, an 



126 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

affair of the community; fetichism is anti-social, 
condemned by the community. Public opinion, 
expressing the moral sentiments of the community 
as well as its religious feeling, pronounces both 
moral and religious disapproval of the man who 
uses a suhman for its special purpose of causing 
death — committing murder. Fetichism is offen- 
sive to the morality as well as to the religion even 
of the native. To seek the origin of religion in 
fetichism is as vain as to seek the origin of morality 
in the selfish and self-seeking tendencies of man. 
There is no need to enquire whether fetichism is 
historically prior to religion, or whether religion is 
historically prior to fetichism. Man, as long as he 
has lived in societies, must have had desires which 
were incompatible with the welfare of the com- 
munity as well as desires which promoted its wel- 
fare. The powers which are supposed to care 
whether the community fares well are the gods of 
the community; and their worship is the religion 
of the community. The powers which have no 
such care are not gods, nor is their worship — if 
coercion or cajolery can be called worship — reli- 
gion. The essence of fetichism on its external 
side is that the owner of the fetich alone has access 



FETICHISM 127 

to it, alone can pray to it, alone can offer sacrifices 
to it. It is therefore in its inward essence directly 
destructive of the unity of interests and purposes 
that society demands and religion promotes. Per- 
haps it would be going too far to say that the prac- 
tice of making prayers and offerings to a fetich is 
borrowed from religious worship: they are the 
natural and instinctive method of approaching any 
power which is capable of granting or refusing what 
we desire. It is the quarter to which they are 
addressed, and the end for which they are employed, 
that makes the difference between them. It is the 
fact that in the one case they are, and in the other 
are not, addressed to the quarter to which they ought 
to be addressed, and employed for the end for which 
they ought to be employed, that makes the difference 
in religious value between them. 

If we bear in mind the simple fact that fetichism 
is condemned by the religious and moral feelings 
of the communities in which it exists, we shall not 
fall into the mistake of regarding fetichism either 
as the primitive religion of mankind or as a stage 
of religious development or as "a basis from which 
many other modes of religious thought have been 
developed." 



128 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Professor Hoffding, holding that fetichism is the 
primitive religion, out of which polytheism was 
developed, adopts Usener's theory as to the mode 
of its evolution. "The fetich," Professor Hoffding 
says (p. 140), " is only the provisional and momen- 
tary dwelling-place of a spirit. As Hermann 
Usener has strikingly called it, it is 'the god of a 
moment. '" But though Professor Hoffding adopts 
this definition of a fetich, it is obvious that the 
course of his argument requires us to understand it 
as subject to a certain limitation. His argument in 
effect is that fetichism is not polytheism, but some- 
thing different, something out of which polytheism 
was evolved. And the difference is that polytheism 
means a plurality of gods, whereas fetichism knows 
no gods, but only spirits. Inasmuch then as, on the 
theory — whether it is held by Hoffding or by any- 
body else — that the spirits of fetichism become the 
gods of polytheism, there must be differences between 
the spirits of the one and the gods of the other, let 
us enquire what the differences are supposed to 
be. 

First, there is the statement that a fetich is the 
"god of a moment," by which must be meant that 
the spirits which, so long as they are momentary and 



FETICHISM 129 

temporary, are fetiches, must come to be permanent 
if they are to attain to the rank of gods. 

But on this point Dr. Haddon differs. He is 
quite clear that a fetich may be worshipped per- 
manently without ceasing to be a fetich. And it is 
indeed abundantly clear that an object only ceases 
to be worshipped when its owner is convinced that it 
is not really a fetich; as long as he is satisfied that 
it is a fetich, he continues its cult — and he continues 
it because it is his personal property, because he, 
and not the rest of the community, has access 
to it. 

Next, Hoffding argues that it is from these mo- 
mentary fetiches that special or specialised deities 
— "departmental gods," as Mr. Andrew Lang has 
termed them — arise. And these "specialised divini- 
ties constitute an advance on gods of the moment" 
(p. 142). Now, what is implied in this argument, 
what is postulated but not expressed, is that a 
fetich has only one particular thing which it can do. 
A departmental god can only do one particular 
sort of thing, has one specialised function. A de- 
partmental god is but a fetich advanced one stage in 
the hierarchy of divine beings. Therefore the func- 
tion of the fetich in the first instance was specialised 



130 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

and limited. But there it is that the a priori argu- 
ment comes into collision with the actual facts. 
A fetich, when it presents itself to a man, assists 
him in the particular business on which he is at the 
moment engaged. But it only continues to act as 
a fetich, provided that it assists him afterwards and 
in other matters also. The desires of the owner 
are not limited, and consequently neither are his 
expectations ; the business of the fetich is to procure 
him general prosperity (Haddon, p. 83). As far 
as fetiches are concerned, it is simply reversing the 
facts to suppose that it is because one fetich can only 
do one thing, that many fetiches are picked up. 
Many objects are picked up on the chance of their 
proving fetiches, because if the object turns out 
really to be a fetich it will bring its owner good luck 
and prosperity generally — there is no knowing what 
it may do. But it is only to its owner that it brings 
prosperity — not to other people, not to the com- 
munity, for the community is debarred access to it. 

The next difference between fetichism and poly- 
theism, according to Hoffding, is that the gods of 
polytheism have developed that personality which 
is not indeed absolutely wanting in the spirits of 
fetichism but can hardly be said to be properly 



FETICHISM 131 

there. "The transition," he says, "from momen- 
tary and special gods to gods which can properly be 
called personal is one of the most important transi- 
tions in the history of religion. It denotes the 
transition from animism to polytheism" (p. 145). 
And one of the outward signs that the transition 
has been effected is, as Usener points out with 
special emphasis, "that only at a certain stage of 
evolution, i.e., on the appearance of polytheism, do 
the gods acquire proper names" (ib. 147). 

Now, this argument, I suggest, seeks to make, or 
to make much of, a difference between fetichism 
and polytheism which scarcely exists, and so far as 
it does exist is not the real difference between them. 
It seeks to minimise, if not to deny, the personality 
of the fetich, in order to exalt that of the gods of 
polytheism. And then this difference in degree of 
personality, this transition from the one degree to 
the other, is exhibited as "one of the most important 
transitions in the history of religion." The question 
therefore is first whether the difference is so great, 
and next whether it is the real difference between 
fetichism and religion in the polytheistic stage. 

The difference in point of personality between the 
spirits of fetichism and the gods of polytheism is not 



132 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

absolute. The fetich, according to Dr. Haddon, 
"possesses personality and will, it has also many 
human characters. It possesses most of the human 
passions, anger, revenge, also generosity and grati- 
tude; it is within reach of influence and may be 
benevolent, is hence to be deprecated and placated, 
and its aid to be enlisted" (p. 83); "the fetich is 
worshipped, prayed to, sacrificed to, and talked 
with" (p. 89). 

But, perhaps it may be said that, though the 
fetich does "possess personality," it is only when it 
has acquired sufficient personality to enjoy a proper 
name that it becomes a god, or fetichism passes 
into polytheism. To this the reply is that poly- 
theism does not wait thus deferentially on the evo- 
lution of proper names. There was a period in the 
evolution of the human race when men neither had 
proper names of their own nor knew their fellows by 
proper names ; and yet they doubted not their per- 
sonality. The simple fact is that he who is to 
receive a name — whether he be a human being or a 
spiritual being — must be there in order to be named. 
When he is there he may receive a name which has 
lost all meaning, as proper names at the present day 
have generally done; or one which has a meaning. 



FETICHISM I33 

A mother may address her child as "John" or as 
"boy," but, whichever form of address she uses, she 
has no doubt that the child has a personality. The 
fact that a fetich has not acquired a proper name is 
not a proof that it has acquired no personality ; if it 
can, as Dr. Haddon says it can, be "petted or 
ill-treated with regard to its past or future be- 
haviour" (p. 90), its personality is undeniable. If it 
can be "worshipped, prayed to, sacrificed to, talked 
with," it is as personal as any deity in a pantheon. 
If it has no proper name, neither at one time had 
men themselves. And Hoffding himself seems dis- 
inclined to follow Usener on this point: "no im- 
portant period," he says (p. 147), "in the history of 
religion can begin with an empty word. The word can 
neither be the beginning nor exist at the beginning." 
Finally Hoffding, to enforce the conclusion that 
polytheism is evolved from fetichism, says: "The 
influence exerted by worship on the life of religious 
ideas can find no more striking exemplification than 
in the word 'god' itself: when we study those ety- 
mologies of this word which, from the philological 
point of view, appear most likely to be correct, we 
find the word really means 'he to whom sacrifice 
is made/ or 'he who is worshipped'" (p. 148). 



134 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Professor Wilhelm Thomsen considers the first ex- 
planation the more probable : "In that case there 
would be a relationship between the root of the word 
1 gotV and ' giessen' (to pour), as also between the 
Greek x €ecv > whose root %v = the Sanskrit hu, from 
which comes huta, which means ' sacrificed/ as well 
as 'he to whom sacrifices are made'" (p. 396). 
Now, if "god" means either "he to whom sacrifice 
is made" or "he who is worshipped," we have only 
to enquire by whom the sacrifice is made or the wor- 
ship paid, according to Professor Hoffding, in order 
to see the value of this philological argument. A 
leading difference between a fetich and a god is that 
sacrifice is made and worship paid to the fetich by 
its owner, to the god by the community. Now 
this philological derivation of "god" throws no light 
whatever on the question by whom the "god" is 
worshipped; but the content of the passage which 
I have quoted shows that Professor Hoffding him- 
self here understands the worship of a god to be 
the worship paid by the community. If that is so, 
and if the function or a function of the being wor- 
shipped is to grant the desires of his worshippers, 
then the function of the being worshipped by the 
community is to grant the desires of the community. 



FETICHISM I35 

And if that is the distinguishing mark or a distinguish- 
ing mark of a god, then the worship of a god differs 
toto caelo from the worship paid to a fetich, whose 
distinguishing mark is that it is subservient to the 
anti-social wishes of its owner, and is not worshipped 
by the community. And it is just as impossible to 
maintain that a god is evolved out of a fetich as it 
would be to argue — indeed it is arguing — that 
practices destructive of society or social welfare 
have only to be pushed far enough and they will 
prove the salvation of society. 

If in the animistic stage, when everything that is 
is worked by spirits, it is possible and desirable for 
the individual to gain his individual ends by the 
cooperation of some spirit, it is equally possible and 
more desirable for the community to gain the aid 
of a spirit which will further the ends for the sake 
of which the community exists. But those ends are 
not transient or momentary, neither therefore can 
the spirit who promotes them be a " momentary" 
god. And if we accept Hoffding's description of 
the simplest and earliest manifestation of the reli- 
gious spirit as being belief "in a power which cares 
whether he [man] has or has not experiences which he 
values," we must be careful to make it clear that the 



136 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

power worshipped by a community is worshipped 
because he is believed to care that the community 
should have the experiences which the community 
values. Having made that stipulation, we may 
accept Hoffding's further statement (p. 147) that 
"even the momentary and special gods implied the 
existence of a personifying tendency and faculty "; 
for, although from our point of view a momentary 
god is a self-contradictory notion, we are quite 
willing to agree that this tendency to personification 
may be taken as primary and primitive: religion 
from the beginning has been the search after a power 
essentially personal. But that way of conceiving 
spiritual powers is not in itself distinctive of or con- 
fined to religion: it is an intellectual conception; 
it is the essence of animism, and animism is not 
religion. To say that an emotional element also 
must be present is true; but neither will that serve 
to mark off fetichism from religion. Fetichism 
also is emotional in tone: it is in hope that the 
savage picks up the thing that may prove to have 
the fetich power; and it is with fear that he recog- 
nises his neighbour's suhman. A god is not merely 
a power conceived of intellectually and felt emotion- 
ally to be a personal power from whom things may 



FETICHISM 137 

be hoped or feared; he must indeed be a personal 
power and be regarded with hope and fear, but it is 
by a community that he must be so regarded. And 
the community, in turning to such a power, worships 
him with sacrifice: a god is indeed he to whom 
sacrifice is made and worship paid by the com- 
munity, with whose interests and whose morality 
— w r ith whose good, in a word, he is from the be- 
ginning identified. "In the absence of experience 
of good as one of the realities of life, no one," Hoff- 
ding says, "would ever have believed in the goodness 
of the gods"; and, we may add, it is as interested 
in and caring for the good of the community that 
the god of the community is worshipped. It is in 
the conviction that he does so care, that religious 
feeling is rooted; or, as Hoffding puts it (p. 162), 
it is rooted in "the need to collect and concentrate 
ourselves, to resign ourselves, to feel ourselves sup- 
ported and carried by a power raised above all 
struggle and opposition and beyond all change." 
There we have, implicit from the beginning, that 
communion with god, or striving thereafter, which 
is essential to worship. It is faith. It is rest. 
It is the heart's desire. And it is not fetichism, 
nor is fetichism it. 



PRAYER 

The physician, if he is to do his work, must know 
both a healthy and a diseased body, or organ, when he 
sees it. He must know the difference between the 
two and the symptoms both of health and disease. 
Otherwise he is in danger of trying to cure an organ 
which is healthy already — in which case his reme- 
dies will simply aggravate the disease. That is 
obviously true of the physician who seeks to heal the 
body, and it is equally, if not so obviously, true of 
the physician who seeks to minister to a mind, or a 
soul, diseased. Now, the missionary will find that 
the heathen, to whom he is to minister, have the 
habit of prayer; and the question arises, What is 
to be his attitude towards it? He cannot take up 
the position that prayer is in itself a habit to be 
condemned; he is not there to eradicate the habit, 
or to uproot the tendency. Neither is he there 
to create the habit ; it already exists, and the wise 
missionary will acknowledge its existence with thank- 
fulness. His business is not to teach his flock to 



PRAYER I39 

pray, but how to pray, that is to say, for what and 
to whom. But even if he thus wisely recognises 
that prayer is a habit not to be created, but to be 
trained by him, it is still possible for him to assume 
rashly that it is simply impossible for a heathen ever 
to pray for anything that is right, and therefore, 
that it is a missionary's duty first to insist that 
everything for which a savage or barbarian prays 
must be condemned as essentially irreligious and 
wicked. In that case, what will such a mission- 
ary, if sent to the Khonds of Orissa, say, when he 
finds them praying thus: "We are ignorant of what 
it is good to ask for. You know what is good for 
us. Give it to us!"? Can he possibly say to his 
flock, "All your prayers, all the things that you pray 
for now, are wicked ; and your only hope of salvation 
lies in ceasing to pray for them"? If not, then he 
must recognise the fact that it is possible for the 
heathen to pray, and to pray for some things that 
it is right to pray for. And he must not only recog- 
nise the fact, but he must utilise it. Nay ! more, he 
must not only recognise the fact if it chances to 
force itself upon him, he must go out of his way 
with the deliberate purpose of finding out what 
things are prayed for. He will then find himself in 



I40 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

more intimate contact with the soul of the man than 
he can ever attain to in any other way ; and he may 
then find that there are other things for which peti- 
tions are put up which could not be prayed for save 
by a man who had a defective or erroneous concep- 
tion of Him who alone can answer prayer. 

But it is a blundering, unbusinesslike way of 
managing things if the missionary has to go out to 
his work unprepared in this essential matter, and 
has to find out these things for himself — and per- 
haps not find them out at all. The applied science 
of religion should equip him in this respect; it 
should be able to take the facts and truths estab- 
lished by the science of religion and apply them to 
the purposes of the missionary. But it is a striking 
example of the youth and immaturity of the science 
of religion that no attempt has yet been made by it 
to collect the facts, much less to coordinate and state 
them scientifically. If a thing is clear, when we 
come to think of it, in the history of religion, it is 
that the gods are there to be prayed to : man worships 
them because it is on their knees that all things lie. 
It is from them that man hopes all things; it is in 
prayer that man expresses his hopes and desires. It 
is from his prayers that we should be able to find out 



PRAYER 141 

what the gods really are to whom man prays. What 
is said about them in mythology — or even in theol- 
ogy — is the product of reflection, and is in many 
cases demonstrably different from what is given in 
consciousness at the moment when man is striving 
after communion with the Highest. Yet it is from 
mythology, or from the still more reflective and de- 
liberative expression of ritual, of rites and ceremonies, 
that the science of religion has sought to infer the 
nature of the gods man worships. The whole appa- 
ratus of religion, rites and ceremonies, sacrifice and 
altars, nature-worship and polytheism, has been in- 
vestigated; the one thing overlooked has been the 
one thing for the sake of which all the others exist, 
the prayer in which man's soul rises, or seeks to rise, 
to God. 

The reason given by Professor Tylor {Primitive 
Culture, II, 364) for this is not that the subject is 
unimportant, but that it is so simple; "so simple 
and familiar," he says, "is the nature of prayer 
that its study does not demand that detail of fact and 
argument which must be given to rites in compari- 
son practically insignificant." Now, it is indeed the 
case that things which are familiar may appear to be 
simple; but it is also the case that sometimes things 



142 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

are considered simple merely because they are 
familiar, and not because they are simple. The 
fact that they are not so simple as every one has 
assumed comes to be suspected when it is discovered 
that people take slightly different views of them. 
Such slightly different views may be detected in this 
case. 

Professor Hoffding holds that, in the lowest 
form in which religion manifests itself, "religion 
appears under the guise of desire," thus rang- 
ing himself on the side of an opinion mentioned 
by Professor Tylor {op. cit., II, 464) that, as regards 
the religion of the lower culture, in prayer "the 
accomplishment of desire is asked for, but desire is 
as yet limited to personal advantage." Now, start- 
ing from this position that prayer is the expression 
of desire, we have only to ask, whose desire? that 
of the individual or that of the community? and 
we shall see that under the simple and familiar 
phrase of "the accomplishment of desire" there 
lurks a difference of view which may possibly widen 
out into a very wide difference of opinion. If we 
appeal to the facts, we may take as an instance a 
prayer uttered "in loud uncouth voice of plaintive, 
piteous tone" by one of the Osages to Wohkonda, 



PRAYER 



!43 



the Master of Life: "Wohkonda, pity me, I am 
very poor; give me what I need; give me success 
against mine enemies, that I may avenge the death 
of my friends. May I be able to take scalps, to take 
horses!" etc. (Tylor, II, 365). So on the Gold 
Coast a negro in the morning will pray, " Heaven! 
grant that I may have something to eat this day" 
(ib., 368), not "give us this day our daily bread"; 
or, raising his eyes to heaven, he will thus address 
the god of heaven: "God, give me to-day rice 
and yams, gold and agries, give me slaves, riches 
and health, and that I may be brisk and swift !" (ib.). 
On the other hand, John Tanner {Narrative, p. 46) 
relates that when Algonquin Indians were setting 
out in a fleet of frail bark canoes across Lake Su- 
perior, the chief addressed a prayer to the Great 
Spirit: "You have made this lake; and you have 
made us, your children ; you can now cause that the 
water shall remain smooth while we pass over in 
safety." The chief, it will be observed, did not 
expressly call the Great Spirit "our Father," but 
he did speak of himself and his men as "your 
children." If we cross over to Africa, again, we 
find the Masai women praying thus; and be it 
observed that though the first person singular is used, 



144 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

it is used by the chorus of women, and is plural in 
effect : — 



" My God, to thee alone I pray 
That offspring may to me be given. 
Thee only I invoke each day, 
O morning star in highest heaven. 
God of the thunder and the rain, 
Give ear unto my suppliant strain. 
Lord of the powers of the air, 
To thee I raise my daily prayer. 



" My God, to thee alone I pray, 
Whose savour is as passing sweet 
As only choicest herbs display, 
Thy blessing daily I entreat. 
Thou hearest when I pray to thee, 
And listenest in thy clemency. 
Lord of the powers of the air, 
To thee I raise my daily prayer." 

— Hollis, The Masai, p. 346. 

When Professor Tylor says that by the savage 
"the accomplishment of desire is asked for, but 
desire is as yet limited to personal advantage/' we 
must be careful not to infer that the only advantage 
a savage is capable of praying for is his own selfish 
advantage. Professor Tylor himself quotes (II, 



PRAYER 145 

366) the following prayer from the war-song of a 

Delaware : — 

" O Great Spirit there above, 
Have pity on my children 
And my wife ! 

Prevent that they shall mourn for me ! 
Let me succeed in this undertaking, 
That I may slay my enemy 
And bring home the tokens of victory 
To my dear family and my friends 
That we may rejoice together. . . . 
Have pity on me and protect my life, 
And I will bring thee an offering." 

Nor is it exclusively for their own personal advan- 
tage that the Masai women are concerned when they 
pray for the safe return of their sons from the wars : — 

11 thou who gavest, thou to whom we pray 
For offspring, take not now thy gift away. 
O morning star, that shinest from afar, 
Bring back our sons in safety from the war." 

— Hollis, p. 351. 

Nor is it in a purely selfish spirit that the Masai 
women pray that their warriors may have the ad- 
vantage over all their enemies : — 

1 

c O God of battles, break 
The power of the foe. 



146 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Their cattle may we take, 
Their mightiest lay low. 

11 

" Sing, O ye maidens fair, 
For triumph o'er the foe. 
This is the time for prayer 
Success our arms may know. 

in 

" Morning and evening stars 
That in the heavens glow, 
Break, as in other wars, 
The power of the foe. 

IV 

" O dweller, where on high 
Flushes at dawn the snow, 
O Cloud God, break, we cry, 
The power of the foe." 

— Ib. y p. 352. 

Again, the rain that is prayed for by the Manganja 
of Lake Nyassa is an advantage indeed, but one 
enjoyed by the community and prayed for by the 
community. They made offerings to the Supreme 
Deity that he might give them rain, and "the 
priestess dropped the meal handful by handful on 
the ground, each time calling in a high-pitched voice, 



PRAYER I47 

1 Hear thou, O God, and send rain ! ' and the 
assembled people responded, clapping their hands 
softly and intoning (they always intone their prayers), 
'Hear thou, O God'" (Tylor, p. 368). 

The appeal then to facts shows that it is with 
the desires of the community that the god of the 
community is concerned, and that it is by a repre- 
sentative of the community that those desires are 
offered up in prayer, and that the community may 
join in. The appeal to facts shows, also, that an 
individual may put up individual petitions, as when 
a Yebu will pray: " God in heaven protect me from 
sickness and death. God give me happiness and 
wisdom." But we may safely infer that the only 
prayers that the god of the community is expected 
to harken to are prayers that are consistent with the 
interests and welfare of the community. 

From that point of view we must refuse to give 
more than a guarded assent to the " opinion that 
prayer appeared in the religion of the lower culture, 
but that in this its earlier stage it was unethical" 
(Tylor, 364). Prayer obviously does appear in the 
religion of the lower culture, but to say that it 
there is unethical is to make a statement which re- 
quires defining. The statement means what Pro- 



I48 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

fessor Tylor expresses later on in the words: "It 
scarcely appears as though any savage prayer, 
authentically native in its origin, were ever directed 
to obtain moral goodness or to ask pardon for 
moral sin" (p. 373). But it might be misunderstood 
to mean that among savages it was customary or 
possible to pray for things recognised by the savage 
himself as wrong, and condemned by the com- 
munity at large. In the first place, however, the 
god of the community simply as being the god of the 
community would not tolerate such prayers. Next, 
the range and extent of savage morality is less exten- 
sive than it is — or at any rate than it ought to be 
— in our day; and though we must recognise and 
at the right time insist upon the difference, that ought 
not to make us close our eyes to the fact that the 
savage does pray to do the things which savage 
morality holds it incumbent on him to do, for in- 
stance to fight bravely for the good of his wife, his 
children, and his tribe, to carry out the duty of 
avenging murder. And if he prays for wealth he 
also prays for wisdom; if he prays that his god may 
deliver him from sickness, that shows he is human 
rather than that he is a low type of humanity. 

It would seem, then, that though in religions of low 



PRAYER I49 

culture we meet religion under the guise of desire, 
we also find that religion makes a distinction be- 
tween desires; there are desires which may be 
expressed to the god of the community, and desires 
which may not. Further^ though it is in the heart 
of a person and an individual that desire must origi- 
nate, it does not follow that prayer originates in 
individual desire. To say so, we must assume that 
the same desire cannot possibly originate simul- 
taneously in different persons. But that is a patently 
erroneous assumption: in time of war, the desire 
for victory will spring up simultaneously in the 
hearts of all the tribe; in time of drought, the 
prayer for rain will ascend from the hearts of all 
the people ; at the time of the sowing of seed a prayer 
for "the kindly fruits of the earth" may be uttered 
by every member of the community. Now it is 
precisely these desires, which being desires must 
originate in individual souls, yet being desires of 
every individual in the community are the desires 
of the community, that are the desires which take 
the form of prayer offered by the community or its 
representative to the god of the community. Anti- 
social desires cannot be expressed by the community 
or sanctioned by religion. Prayer is the essential 



150 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

expression of true socialism; and the spirit which 
prompts it is and has always been the moving spirit 
of social progress. 

Professor Tylor, noticing the "extreme develop- 
ment of mechanical religion, the prayer-mill of the 
Tibetan Buddhists," suggests that it "may perhaps 
lead us to form an opinion of large application in 
the study of religion and superstition; namely, that 
the theory of prayers may explain the origin of 
charms. Charm-formulae," he says, "are in very 
many cases actual prayers, and as such are intelli- 
gible. Where they are mere verbal forms, producing 
their effect on nature and man by some unexplained 
process, may not they or the types they have been 
modelled on have been originally prayers, since 
dwindled into mystic sentences ? " (P. C. II, 
372-373). Now, if this suggestion of Professor 
Tylor's be correct, it will follow that as charms and 
spells are degraded survivals of prayer, so magic 
generally — of which charms and spells are but one 
department — is a degradation of religion. That 
in many cases charms and spells are survivals of 
prayer — formulae from which all spirit of religion 
has entirely evaporated — all students of the science 
of religion would now admit. That prayers may 



PRAYER 151 

stiffen into traditional formulae, and then become 
vain repetitions which may actually be unintelligible 
to those who utter them, and so be conceived to 
have a force which is purely magical and a " nature 
practically assimilated more or less to that of 
charms" (I.e.), is a fact which cannot be denied. 



V 






But when once the truth has been admitted that 
prayers may pass into spells, the possibility is sug- 
gested that it is out of spells that prayer has 
originated. Mercury raised to a high temperature 
becomes red precipitate ; and red precipitate exposed 
to a still greater heat becomes mercury again. Spells 
may be the origin of prayers, if prayers show a 
tendency to relapse into spells. That possibility fits 
in either with the theory that magic preceded re- 
ligion or still more exactly with the theory that 
religion simply is magic raised, so to speak, to a 
higher moral temperature. We have therefore to 
consider the possibility that the process of evolution 
has been from spell to prayer (R. R. Marett, Folk- 
Lore XV, 2, pp. 132-166); and let us begin the 
consideration by observing that the reverse passage — 
from prayer to spell — is only possible on the con- 
dition that religion evaporates entirely in the process. 
The prayer does not become a charm until the 



I52 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

religion has disappeared entirely from it: a charm 
therefore is that in which no religion is, and out of 
which consequently no religion can be extracted. 
If then, per impossibile, it could be demonstrated 
that there was a period in the history of mankind, 
when charms and magic existed, and religion was 
utterly unknown ; if it be argued that the spirit of 
religion, when at length it breathed upon mankind, 
transformed spells into prayers — still all that would 
then be maintained is that spoken formulae which 
were spells were followed by other formulae which 
are the very opposite of spells. Must we not, how- 
ever, go one step further and admit that one and 
the same form of words may be prayer and religion 
when breathed in one spirit, and vain repetition and 
mere magic when uttered in another ? Let us admit 
that the difference between prayer and spell lies in 
the difference of the spirit inspiring them; and then 
we shall see that the difference is essential, funda- 
mental, as little to be ignored as it is impossible 
to bridge. 

The formula used by the person employing it to 
express his desire may or may not in itself suffice to 
show whether it is religious in intent and value. 
Thus in West Africa the women of Framin dance 



PRAYER I53 

and sing, "Our husbands have gone to Ashantee 
land; may they sweep their enemies off the face 
of the earth" (Frazer, Golden Bough, 2 I, 34). We 
may compare the song sung in time of war by the 
Masai women : " O God, to whom I pray for off- 
spring, may our children return hither " (Hollis, 
p. 351); and there seems no reason why, since the 
Masai song is religious, the Framin song may not be 
regarded as religious also. But we have to remember 
that both prayers and spells have a setting of their 
own : the desires which they express manifest them- 
selves not only in what is said but in what is done; 
and, when we enquire what the Framin women 
do whilst they sing the words quoted above, we find 
that they dance with brushes in their hands. The 
brushes are quite as essential as the words. It 
is therefore suggested that the whole ceremony is 
magical, that the sweeping is sympathetic magic 
and the song is a spell. The words explain what the 
action is intended to effect, just as in New Caledonia 
when a man has kindled a smoky fire and has 
performed certain acts, he "invokes his ancestors 
and says, ' Sun ! I do this that you may be burning 
hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky'" (Frazer, 
ib. } 116). Again, amongst the Masai in time of 



154 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

drought a charm called ol-kora is thrown into a fire; 
the old men encircle the fire and sing : — 

" God of the rain -cloud, slake our thirst, 
We know thy far-extending powers, 
As herdsmen lead their kine to drink, 
Refresh us with thy cooling showers." 

— Hollis, p. 348. 

If the ol-kora which is thrown into the fire makes 
it rise in clouds of smoke, resembling the rain- 
clouds which are desired, then here too the cere- 
mony taken as a whole presents the appearance 
of a magical rite accompanied by a spoken spell. 
It is true that in this case the ceremony is reenforced 
by an appeal to a god, just as in the New Caledonian 
case it is reenforced by an appeal to ancestor worship. 
But this may be explained as showing that here we 
have magic and charms being gradually superseded 
by religion and prayer ; the old formula and the old 
rite are in process of being suffused by a new spirit, 
the spirit of religion, which is the very negation and 
ultimately the destruction of the old spirit of magic. 
Before accepting this interpretation, however, 
which is intended to show the priority of magic to 
religion, we may notice that it is not the only inter- 
pretation of which the facts are susceptible. It is 



PRAYER I55 

based on the assumption that the words uttered are 
intended as an explanation of the meaning of the 
acts performed. If that assumption is correct, then 
the performer of the ceremony is explaining its mean- 
ing and intention to somebody. To whom ? In the 
case of the New Caledonian ceremony, to the an- 
cestral spirits; in the case of the Masai old men, 
to the god. Thus, the religious aspect of the cere- 
mony appears after all to be an essential part of the 
ceremony, and not a new element in an old rite. 
And, then, we may consistently argue that the Fra- 
min women who sing, "Our husbands have gone 
to Ashantee land; may they sweep their enemies 
off the face of the earth," are either still conscious 
that they are addressing a prayer to their native 
god ; or that, if they are no longer conscious of the 
fact, they once were, and what was originally 
prayer has become by vain repetition a mere spell. 
All this is on the assumption that in these cere- 
monies, the words are intended to explain the mean- 
ing of the acts performed, and therefore to explain 
it to somebody, peradventure he will understand 
and grant the performer of the ceremony his heart's 
desire. But, as the consequences of the assumption 
do not favour the theory that prayer must be pre- 



I56 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

ceded by spell, let us discard the assumption that the 
words explain the meaning of the acts performed. 
Let us consider the possibility that perhaps the 
actions which are gone through are meant to explain 
the words and make them more forcible. It is unde- 
niable that in moments of emotion we express our- 
selves by gesture and the play of our features as 
well as by our words ; indeed, in reading a play we 
are apt to miss the full meaning of the words simply 
because they are not assisted and interpreted by the 
actor's gestures and features. If we take up this 
position, that the things done are explanatory of the 
words uttered and reenforce them, then the sweeping 
which is acted by the Framin women again is not 
magical; it simply emphasises the words, "may 
they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth," 
and shows to the power appealed to what it is that is 
desired. The smoke sent up by the New Caledonian 
ancestor worshipper or the Masai old men is a way 
of indicating the clouds which they wish to attract 
or avert respectively. An equally clear case comes 
from the Kei Islands: "When the warriors have 
departed, the women return indoors and bring out 
certain baskets containing fruits and stones. These 
fruits and stones they anoint and place on a board, 



PRAYER 157 

murmuring as they do so, ' O lord sun, moon, let 
the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, 
betrothed, and other relations, just as raindrops re- 
bound from these objects which are smeared with 
oil'" (Frazer, op. ciL, p. 33). It is, I think, perfectly 
reasonable to regard the act performed as explana- 
tory of the words uttered and of the thing desired; 
the women themselves explain to their lords, the sun 
and moon, — with the precision natural to women 
when explaining what they want, — exactly how they 
want the bullets to bounce off, just like raindrops. 
Dr. Frazer, however, from whom I have quoted this 
illustration, not having perhaps considered the pos- 
sibility that the acts performed may be explanatory 
of the words, is compelled to explain the action as 
magical: "in this custom the ceremony of anointing 
stones in order that the bullets may recoil from the 
men like raindrops from the stones is a piece of pure 
sympathetic or imitative magic." He is therefore 
compelled to suggest that the prayer to the sun is a 
prayer that he will give effect to the charm, and is 
perhaps a later addition. But independently of the 
possibility that the actions performed are explana- 
tory of the words, or rather that words and actions 
both are intended to make clear to the sun precisely 



158 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

what the petition is, what tells against Dr. Frazer's sug- 
gestion is that the women want the bullets to bounce off, 
and it is the power of the god to which they appeal 
and on which they rely for the fulfilment of their prayer. 
There is, however, a further consideration which 
we should perhaps take into account. Man, when 
he has a desire which he wishes to realise, — and 
the whole of our life is spent in trying to realise 
what we wish, — takes all the steps which experience 
shows to be necessary or reason suggests; and, when 
he has done everything that he can do, he may still 
feel that nothing is certain in this life, and the thing 
may not come off. Under those circumstances he 
may, and often does, pray that success may attend 
his efforts. Now Dr. Frazer, in the second edition 
of his Golden Bough, wishing to show that the period 
of religion was preceded by a non-religious period in 
the history of mankind, suggests that at first man 
had no idea that his attempts to realise his desires 
could fail, and that it was his " tardy recognition " 
of the fact that led him to religion. This tardy 
recognition, he says, probably " proceeded very 
slowly, and required long ages for its more or less 
perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of 
man's powerlessness to influence the course of 



PRAYER 159 

nature on a grand scale must have been gradual" 
(I, 78). I would suggest, however, that it cannot 
have taken "long ages" for savage man to discover 
that his wishes and his plans did not always come 
off. It is, I think, going too far to imagine that 
for long ages man had no idea that his attempts to 
realise his desires could fail. If religion arises, as 
Dr. Frazer suggests, when man recognises his own 
weakness and his own powerlessness, often, to effect 
what he most desires, then man in his most primi- 
tive and most helpless condition must have been 
most ready to recognise that there were powers 
other than himself, and to desire, that is to pray 
for, their assistance. Doubtless it would be at the 
greater crises, times of pestilence, drought, famine 
and war, that his prayers would be most insistent; 
but it is in the period of savagery that famine is most 
frequent and drought most to be feared. Against 
them he takes all the measures known to him, all 
the practical steps which natural science, as under- 
stood by him, can suggest. Now his theory and 
practice include many things which, though they are 
in later days regarded as uncanny and magical, are 
to him the ordinary natural means of producing the 
effects which he desires. But when he has taken all 



l6o COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

the steps which practical reason suggests, and ex- 
perience of the past approves, savage man, harassed 
by the dread of approaching drought or famine, may 
still breathe out the Manganja prayer, "Hear thou, 

God, and send rain." When, however, he does 
so, it is, I suggest, doubly erroneous to infer that 
this prayer takes the place of a spell or that apart 
from the prayer the acts performed are, and origi- 
nally were, magical. These acts may be based on the 
principle that like produces like and maybe performed 
as the ordinary, natural means for producing the effect, 
which have nothing magical about them. And they are 
accompanied by a prayer which is not a mere explana- 
tion or statement of the purpose with which the acts are 
performed, but is the expression of the heart's desire, 

No a priori proofs of any cogency, therefore, have 
been adduced by Dr. Frazer, and none therefore are 
likely to be produced by any one else, to show that 
there was ever a period in the history of man when 
prayers and religion were unknown to him. The 
question remains whether any actual instances are 
known to the science of religion. Unfortunately, as 

1 pointed out at the beginning of this lecture, so 
neglected by the science of religion has been the 
subject of prayer that even now we are scarcely 



PRAYER l6l 

able to go beyond the statement made more than a 
quarter of a century ago by Professor Tylor that, 
"at low levels of civilisation there are many races 
who distinctly admit the existence of spirits, but are 
not certainly known to pray to them even in thought" 
(P. C. II, 364). Professor Tylor's statement is pro- 
perly guarded : there are races not certainly known 
to pray. The possibility that they may yet be dis- 
covered to make prayers is not excluded. 

Now, if we turn to one of the lowest levels of 
culture, that of the Australian black fellows, we 
shall find that there is much doubt amongst students 
whether the "aborigines have consciously any 
form of religion whatever" (Howitt, Native Tribes 
of S. E. Australia), and in southeast Australia 
Mr. Howitt thinks it cannot be alleged that they 
have, though their beliefs are such that they 
might easily have developed into an actual religion 
(P- 5°7)- Now one of the tribes of southeast Aus- 
tralia is that of the Dieri. With them rain is very 
important, for periods of drought are frequent; 
and "rain-making ceremonies are considered of 
much consequence" (p. 394). The ceremonies 
are symbolic: there is " blood to symbolise the 
rain" and two large stones " representing gathering 



1 62 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

clouds presaging rain," just as the New Caledonian 
sends up clouds of smoke to symbolise rain-clouds, 
and the Masai, we have conjectured, throw ol-kora 
into the fire for the same purpose. But the New 
Caledonian not only performs the actions prescribed 
for the rite, he also invokes the spirits of his an- 
cestors; and the Masai not only go through the 
proper dance, but call upon the god of the rain-cloud. 
The Dieri, however, ought to be content with their 
symbolic or sympathetic magic and not offer up 
any prayer. But, being unaware of this fact, they 
do pray: they call "upon the rain-making Mura- 
muras to give them power to make a heavy rain- 
fall, crying out in loud voices the impoverished 
state of the country, and the half-starved condition 
of the tribe, in consequence of the difficulty in pro- 
curing food in sufficient quantity to preserve life" 
(p. 394). The Mura-muras seem to be ancestral 
spirits, like those invoked by the New Caledonian. 
If we turn to the Euahlayi tribe of northwestern 
New South Wales, we find that at the Boorah rites 
a prayer is offered to Byamee, "asking him to let 
the blacks live long, for they have been faithful 
to his charge as shown by the observance of the 
Boorah ceremony" (L. Parker, The Euahlayi 



PRAYER 163 

Tribe y p. 79). That is the prayer of the community 
to Byamee, and is in conformity with what we have 
noted before, viz. that it is with the desires of the 
community that the god of the community is con- 
cerned. Another prayer, the nature of which is not 
stated by Mrs. Parker, by whom the information is 
given us, is put up at funerals, presumably to 
Byamee by the community or its representative. 
Mrs. Parker adds: "Though we say that actually 
these people have but two attempts at prayers, 
one at the grave and one at the inner Boorah ring, 
I think perhaps we are wrong. When a man in- 
vokes aid on the eve of battle, or in his hour of 
danger and need; when a woman croons over her 
baby an incantation to keep him honest and true, 
and that he shall be spared in danger, — surely these 
croonings are of the nature of prayers born of the 
same elementary frame of mind as our more elabo- 
rate litanies." As an instance of the croonings 
Mrs. Parker gives the mother's song over her baby 
as soon as it begins to crawl : — 

"Kind be, 
Do not steal, 

Do not touch what to another belongs, 
Leave all such alone, 
Kind be." 



164 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

These instances may suffice to show that it would 
not have been safe to infer, a year or two ago, from 
the fact that the Australians were not known to pray, 
that therefore prayer was unknown to them. Indeed, 
we may safely go farther and surmise that other 
instances besides those noted really exist, though 
they have not been observed or if observed have 
not been understood. Among the northern tribes 
of central Australia rites are performed to secure 
food, just as they are performed by the Dieri to 
avert drought. The Dieri rites are accompanied 
by a prayer, as we have seen. The Kaitish rites 
to promote the growth of grass are accompanied 
by the singing of words, which "have no meaning 
known to the natives of the present day" (Spencer 
and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 292). Amongst 
the Mara tribe the rain-making rite consists simply 
in " singing" the water, drinking it and spitting it 
out in all directions. In the Anula tribe "dugongs 
are a favourite article of food," and if the natives 
desire to bring them out from the rocks, they "can 
do so by ' singing' and throwing sticks at the rocks" 
(ib., pp. 313, 314). It is reasonable to suppose that 
in all these cases the " singing" is now merely a 
charm. But if we remember that prayers, when 



PRAYER 165 

their meaning is forgotten, pass by vain repetitions 
into mere charms, we may also reasonably suppose 
that these Australian charms are degraded prayers; 
and we shall be confirmed in this supposition to 
some extent by the fact that in the Kaitish tribes 
the words sung "have no meaning known to the 
natives of the present day." If the meaning has 
evaporated, the religion may have evaporated with 
it. That the rites, of which the "singing" is an 
essential part, have now become magical and are 
used and understood to be practised purely to pro- 
mote the supply of dugongs and other articles of 
food, may be freely admitted; but it is unsafe to 
infer that the purpose with which the rites continue 
to be practised is the whole of the purpose with 
which they were originally performed. If the 
meaning of the "singing" has passed entirely away, 
the meaning of the rites may have suffered a change. 
At the present day the rite is understood to increase 
the supply of dugongs or other articles of food. 
But it may have been used originally for other 
purposes. Presumably rites of a similar kind, 
certainly of some kind, are practised by the Aus- 
tralians who have for their totem the blow-fly, the 
water-beetle, or the evening star. But they do not 



1 66 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

eat flies or beetles. Their original purpose in choos- 
ing the evening star cannot have been to increase 
its number. Nor can that have been the object of 
choosing the mosquito for a totem. But if the 
object of the rites is not to increase the number of 
mosquitoes, flies, and beetles, it need not in the first 
instance have been the object with which the rites 
were celebrated in the case of other totems. 

Let us now return to Professor Tylor's statement 
that "at low levels of civilisation there are many 
races who distinctly admit the existence of spirits, 
but are not certainly known to pray to them even 
in thought." The number of those races who are 
not known to pray is being reduced, as we have seen. 
And I think we may go even farther than that and 
say that where the existence of spirits is not merely 
believed in, but is utilised for the purpose of estab- 
lishing permanent relations between a community 
and a spirit, we may safely infer that the community 
offers prayer to the spirit, even though the fact 
may have escaped the notice of travellers. The 
reason why we may infer it is that at the lower levels 
of civilisation we meet with religion, in Hoffding's 
words, "in the guise of desire." We may put the 
same truth in other words and say that religion is 



PRAYER 167 

from the beginning practical. Such prayers as are 
known to us to be put up by the lowest races are 
always practical: they may be definite petitions 
for definite goods such as harvest or rain or victory 
in time of war; or they may be general petitions 
such as that of the Khonds: "We are ignorant of 
what it is good for us to ask for. You know what 
is good for us. Give it us." But in any case what 
the god of a community is there for is to promote 
the good of the community. It is because the savage 
has petitions to put up that he believes there are 
powers who can grant his petitions. Prayer is the 
very root of religion. When the savage has taken 
every measure he knows of to produce the result he 
desires, he then goes on to pray for the rainfall he 
desires, crying out in a loud voice "the impoverished 
state of the country and the half-starved condition 
of the tribe." It is true that it is in moments of 
stress particularly, if not solely, that the savage turns 
to his god — and the same may be said of many 
of us — but it is with confidence and hope that he 
turns to him. If he had no confidence and no hope, 
he would offer no prayers. But he has hope, he has 
faith ; and every time he prays his heart says, if his 
words do not, "in Thee, Lord, do we put our trust." 



1 68 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

That prayer is the essence, the very breath,' of 
religion, without which it dies, is shown by the 
fact that amongst the very lowest races of mankind 
we find frequent traditions of the existence of a 
high god or supreme being, the creator of the world 
and the father of mankind. The numerous traces 
of this dying tradition have been collected by the 
untiring energy and the unrivalled knowledge of 
Mr. Andrew Lang in his book, The Making of 
Religion. In West Africa Dr. Nassau {Fetichism 
in West Africa, pp. 36 ff.) " hundreds of times'' 
(p. 37) has found that "they know of a Being 
superior to themselves, of whom they themselves," 
he says, "inform me that he is the Maker and the 
Father." What is characteristic of the belief of 
the savages in this god is that, in Dr. Nassau's 
words, "it is an accepted belief, but it does not often 
influence their life. ' God is not in all their thought.' 
In practice they give Him no worship." The belief 
is in fact a dying tradition; and it is dying because 
prayer is not offered to this remote and traditional 
god. I say that the belief is a dying tradition, and 
I say so because its elements, which are all found 
present and active where a community believes 
in, prays to, and worships the god of the community, 



PRAYER 169 

are found partially, but only partially, present where 
the belief survives but as a tradition. Thus, for 
instance, where the belief is fully operative, the god 
of the community sanctions the morality of the 
community; but sometimes where the belief has 
become merely traditional, this traditional god is 
supposed to take no interest in the community and 
exercises no ethical influence over the community. 
Thus, in West Africa, Nyankupon is " ignored 
rather than worshipped." In the Andaman Islands, 
on the other hand, where the god Puluga is still 
angered by sin or wrong-doing, he is pitiful to those 
in pain or distress and " sometimes deigns to afford 
relief" (Lang p, 212 quoting Man, J. A. /., XII, 
158). Again, where the belief in the god of the 
community is* fully operative, the occasions on 
which the prayers of the community are offered are 
also the occasions on which sacrifice is made. 
Where sacrifice and prayers are not offered, the 
belief may still for a time survive, at is does among 
the Fuegians. They make no sacrifice and, as 
far as is known, offer no prayers ; but to kill a man 
brings down the wrath of their god, the big man in 
the woods: "Rain come down, snow come down, 
hail come down, wind blow, blow, very much blow. 



170 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Very bad to kill man. Big man in woods no like 
it, he very angry" (Lang, p. 188, quoting Fitzroy, 
II, 180). But when sacrifice and prayer cease, 
the ultimate outcome is that which is found amongst 
the West African natives, who, as Dr. Nassau tells 
us (p. 38), say with regard to Anzam, whom they 
admit to be their Creator and Father, "Why should 
we care for him? He does not help nor harm us. 
It is the spirits who can harm us whom we fear 
and worship, and for whom we care." Who the 
spirits are Dr. Nassau does not say, but they must 
be either the other gods of the place or the fetich 
spirits. And the reason why Anzam is no longer 
believed to help or harm the natives is obviously 
that, from some cause or other, there is now no 
longer any established form of worship of him. 
The community of which he was originally the god 
may have broken up, or more probably may have 
been broken up, with the result that the congrega- 
tion which met to offer prayer and sacrifice to Anzam 
was scattered; and the memory of him alone 
survives. Nothing would be more natural, then, 
than that the natives, when asked by Dr. Nassau, 
"Why do you not worship him?" (p. 38), should 
invent a reason, viz. that it is no use worshipping 



PRAYER 171 

him now — the truth being that the form of wor- 
ship has perished for reasons now no longer present 
to the natives' mind. In any case, when prayers 
cease to be offered — whether because the com- 
munity is broken up or because some new quarter 
is discovered to which prayers can be offered with 
greater hope of success — when prayers, for any 
reason, do cease to be offered to a god, the worship 
of him begins to cease also, for the breath of life 
has departed from it. 

In this lecture, as my subject is primitive religion, 
I have made no attempt to trace the history of 
prayer farther than the highest point which it reaches 
in the lower levels of religion. That is the point 
reached by the Khond prayer: "We are ignorant 
of what it is good to ask for. You know what is 
good for us. Give it us." That is also the highest 
point reached by the most religious mind amongst 
the ancient Greeks : Socrates prayed the gods simply 
for things good, because the gods knew best what 
is good (Xen., Mem., I, hi, 2). The general impres- 
sion left on one's mind by the prayers offered in 
this stage of religious development is that man is 
here and the gods are — there. But "there" is 
such a long way off. And yet, far off as it is, man 



172 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

never came to think it was so far off that the gods 
could not hear. The possibility of man's entering 
into some sort of communication with them was 
always present. Nay! more, a community of 
interests between him and them was postulated: 
the gods were to promote the interests of the com- 
munity, and man was to serve the gods. On oc- 
casions when sacrifice was made and prayer was 
offered, the worshippers entered into the presence 
of God, and communion with Him was sought ; but 
stress was laid rather on the sacrifice offered than 
on the prayers sent up. The communion at which 
animal sacrifice aimed may have been gross at times, 
and at others mystic; but it was the sacrifice rather 
than the prayer which accompanied it that was 
regarded as essential to the communion desired, as 
the means of bridging the gap between man here 
and the gods there. If, however, the gap was to be 
bridged, a new revelation was necessary, one re- 
vealing the real nature of the sacrifice required by 
God, and of the communion desired by man. And 
that revelation is made in Our Lord's Prayer. 
With the most earnest and unfeigned desire to use 
the theory of evolution as a means of ordering the 
facts of the history of religion and of enabling us — 



PRAYER 173 

so far as it can enable us — to understand them, 
one is bound to notice as a fact that the theory of 
evolution is unable to account for or explain the 
revelation, made in Our Lord's Prayer, of the spirit 
which is both human and divine. It is the beam 
of light which, when turned on the darkness of the 
past, enables us to see whither man with his prayers 
and his sacrifices had been blindly striving, the place 
where he fain would be. It is the surest beacon 
the missionary can hold out to those who are still 
in darkness and who show by the fact that they 
pray — if only for rain, for harvest, and victory 
over all their enemies — that they are battling with 
the darkness and that they have not turned entirely 
away from the light of His countenance who is 
never at any time far from any one of us. Their 
heart within them is ready to bear witness. Re- 
ligion is present in them, if only under "the guise of 
desire"; but it is "the desire of all nations" for 
which they yearn. 

There are, Hoffding says, "two tendencies in 
the nature of religious feeling: on the one hand 
there is the need to collect and concentrate our- 
selves, to resign ourselves, to feel ourselves sup- 
ported and carried by a power raised above all 



174 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

struggle and opposition and beyond all change. 
But within the religious consciousness another need 
makes itself felt, the need of feeling that in the 
midst of the struggle we have a fellow-struggler at 
our side, a fellow-struggler who knows from his own 
experience what it is to suffer and meet resist ance" 
{The Philosophy of Religion, § 54). Between these 
two tendencies Hoffding discovers an opposition 
or contradiction, an " antinomy of religious feeling." 
But it is precisely because Christianity alone of all 
religions recognises both needs that it transcends 
the antinomy. The antinomy is indeed purely 
intellectual. Hoffding himself says, "only when 
recollection, collation, and comparison are possible 
do we discover the opposition or the contradiction 
between the two tendencies." And in saying that, 
inasmuch as recollection, collation, and comparison 
are intellectual processes, he admits that the an- 
tinomy is intellectual. That it is not an antinomy 
of religious feeling is shown by the fact that the 
two needs exist, that is to say, are both felt. To 
say a priori that both cannot be satisfied is useless 
in face of the fact that those who feel them find 
that Christianity satisfies them. 



SACRIFICE 

In my last lecture I called attention to the fact 
that the subject of prayer has been strangely neglected 
by the science of religion. Religion, in whatever 
form it manifests itself, is essentially practical ; man 
desires to enter into communication or into commu- 
nion with his god, and in so doing he has a practical 
purpose in view. That purpose may be to secure a 
material blessing of a particular kind, such as vic- 
tory in war or the enjoyment of the fruits of the earth 
in their due season, or the purpose may be to offer 
thanks for a harvest and to pray for a continuance 
of prosperity generally. Or the purpose of prayer 
may be to ask for deliverance from material evils, 
such as famine or plague. Or it may be to ask for 
deliverance from moral evils and for power to do 
God's will. In a word, if man had no prayer to 
make, the most powerful, if not the only, motive 
inciting him to seek communion would be wanting. 
Now, to some of us it may seem a priori that there 
is no reason why the communion thus sought in 

x 75 



176 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

prayer should require any external rite to sanction 
or condition it. If that is our a priori view, we 
shall be the more surprised to find that in actual fact 
an external rite has always been felt to be essential; 
and that rite has always been and still is sacrifice, in 
one or other of its forms. Or, to put the same fact 
in another way, public worship has been from the 
beginning the condition without which private wor- 
ship could not begin and without which private 
worship cannot continue. To any form of religion, 
whatever it be, it is essential, if it is to be religion, 
that there shall be a community of worshippers and 
a god worshipped. The bond which unites the 
worshippers with one another and with their god is 
religion. From the beginning the public worship 
in which the worshippers have united has expressed 
itself in rites — rites of sacrifice — - and in the prayers 
of the community. To the end, the prayers offered 
are prayers to " Our Father " ; and if the worshipper 
is spatially separated from, he is spiritually united 
to, his fellow-worshippers even in private prayer. 

We may then recognise that prayer logically and 
ultimately implies sacrifice in one or other of its 
senses; and that sacrifice as a rite is meaningless 
and impossible without prayer. But if we recognise 



SACRIFICE 177 

that sacrifice wherever it occurs implies prayer, then 
the fact that the observers of savage or barbarous 
rites have described the ritual , acts of sacrifice, but 
have not observed or have neglected to report the 
prayers implied, will not lead us into the error of 
imagining that sacrifice is a rite which can exist — 
that it can have a religious existence — without 
prayer. We may attend to either, the sacrifice or to 
the prayer, as we may attend either to the concav- 
ity or the convexity of a curve, but we may not deny 
the existence and presence of the one because our 
attention happens to be concentrated on the other. 
The relation in primitive religion of the one to the 
other we may express by saying that prayer states the 
motive with which the sacrifice is made, and that 
sacrifice is essential to the prayer, which would not 
be efficacious without the sacrifice. The reason why 
a community can address the god which it worships 
is that the god is felt to be identified in some way 
with the community and to have its interests in his 
charge and care. And the rite of sacrifice is felt 
to make the identification more real. Prayer, again, 
is possible only to the god to whom the community 
is known; with whom it is identified, more or less; 
and with whom, when his help is required, the com- 



178 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

munity seeks to identify itself more effectually. 
The means of that identification without which the 
prayers of the community would be ineffectual is 
sacrifice. The earliest form of sacrifice may prob- 
ably be taken to be the sacrifice of an animal, fol- 
lowed by a sacrificial meal. Later, when the god 
has a stated place in which he is believed to manifest 
himself, — tree or temple, — then the identification 
may be effected by attaching offerings to the tree 
or temple. But in either case what is sought by the 
offering dedicated or the meal of sacrifice is in a 
word " incorporation." The worshippers desire to 
feel that they are at one with the spirit whom they 
worship. And the desire to experience this sense of 
union is particularly strong when plague or famine 
makes it evident that some estrangement has taken 
place between the god and the community which is 
normally in his care and under his protection. The 
sacrifices and prayers that are offered in such a case 
obviously do not open up communication for the first 
time between the god and his tribe : they revive and 
reenforce a communion which is felt to exist already, 
even though temporal misfortunes, such as drought 
or famine, testify that it has been allowed by the 
tribe to become less close than it ought to be, or that 



SACRIFICE 179 

it has been strained by transgressions on the part of 
individual members of the community. But it is 
not only in times of public distress that the com- 
munity approaches its god with sacrifice and 
prayer. It so happens that the prayers offered for 
victory in war or for rain or for deliverance from 
famine are instances of prayer of so marked a char- 
acter that they have forced themselves on the notice 
of travellers in all parts of the world, from the 
Eskimo to the Australian black fellows or the negroes 
of Africa. And it was to this class of prayers that 
I called your attention principally in the last lec- 
ture. But they are, when we come to think of it, 
essentially occasional prayers, prayers that are 
offered at the great crises of tribal life, when the 
very existence of the tribe is at stake. Such crises, 
however, by their very nature are not regular or 
normal; and it would be an error to suppose that 
it is only on these occasions that prayers are made 
by savage or barbarous peoples. If we wish to dis- 
cover the earliest form of regularly recurring public 
worship, we must look for some regularly recurring 
occasion for it. One such regularly recurring oc- 
casion is harvest time, another is seed time, another 
is the annual ceremonial at which the boys who at- 



l8o COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

tain in the course of the year to the age of manhood 
are initiated into the secrets or "mysteries" of the 
tribe. These are the chief and perhaps the only 
regularly recurring occasions of public worship as 
distinguished from the irregular crises of war, pesti- 
lence, drought, and famine which affect the com- 
munity as a whole, and from the irregular occasions 
when the individual member of the community prays 
for offspring or for delivery from sickness or for suc- 
cess in the private undertaking in which he happens 
to be engaged. 

Of the regularly recurring occasions of public 
worship I will select, to begin with, the rites which 
are associated with harvest time. And I will do so 
partly because the science of religion provides us 
with very definite particulars both as to the sacrifices 
and as to the prayers which are usually made on 
these occasions; and partly because the prayers 
that are made are of a special kind and throw a 
fresh light on the nature of the communion that 
the tribe seeks to effect by means of the sacrificial 
offering. 

At Saa, in the Solomon Islands, yams are offered, 
and the person offering them cries in a loud voice, 
"This is yours to eat" (Frazer, G. B.\ II, 465). In 



SACRIFICE l8l 

the Society Islands the formula is, "Here, Tari, I have 
brought you something to eat" (ib., 469). In Indo- 
China, the invitation is the same: "Taste, O god- 
dess, these first-fruits which have just been reaped" 
(ib., 325). There are no actually expressed words 
of thanks in these instances; but we may safely 
conjecture that the offerings are thank-offerings and 
that the feeling with which the offerings are made is 
one of gratitude and thankfulness. Thus in Ceram 
we are told that first-fruits are offered "as a token of 
gratitude" (ib., 463). On the Niger the Onitsha 
formula is explicit: "I thank God for being per- 
mitted to eat the new yam" (ib., 325). At Tjumba 
in the East Indies, "vessels filled with rice are pre- 
sented as a thank-offering to the gods" (ib., 462). 
The people of Nias on these occasions offer thanks 
for the blessings bestowed on them (ib., 463). By a 
very natural transition of thought and feeling, thank- 
fulness for past favours leads to prayer for the con- 
tinuance of favour in the future. Thus in Tana, in 
the New Hebrides, the formula is: "Compassion- 
ate father ! here is some food for you ; eat it ; be 
kind to us on account of it" (ib., 464); while the 
Basutos say: "Thank you, gods; give us bread 
to-morrow also" (ib., 459) ; and in Tonga the prayers 



1 82 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

made at the offering of first-fruits implore the pro- 
tection of the gods, and beseech them for welfare 
generally, though in especial for the fruits of the 
earth (ib., 466). 

The prayers of primitive man which I quoted in 
my last lecture were in the nature of petitions or 
requests, as was natural and indeed inevitable in 
view of the fact that they were preferred on occasions 
when the tribe was in exceptional distress and re- 
quired the aid of the gods on whose protection the 
community relied. But the prayers which I have 
just quoted are not in their essence petitions or 
requests, even though in some cases they tend to 
become so. They are essentially prayers of thanks- 
giving and the offerings made are thank-offerings. 
Thus our conception of primitive prayer must be 
extended to include both mental attitudes — that 
of thankfulness for past or present blessings as well 
as the hope of blessings yet to come. And inasmuch 
as sacrifice is the concomitant of prayer, we must 
recognise that sacrificial offerings also serve as the 
expression of both mental attitudes. And we must 
note that in the regularly recurring form of public 
or tribal worship with which we are now dealing 
the dominant feeling to which expression is given is 



SACRIFICE 183 

that of thankfulness. The tribe seeks for communion 
with its god for the purpose of expressing its thanks. 
Even the savage who simply says, "Here, Tari, I 
have brought you something to eat," or, still more 
curtly, "This is yours to eat," is expressing thanks, 
albeit in savage fashion. And the means which the 
savage adopts for securing that communion which 
he seeks to renew regularly with the tribal god is a 
sacrificial meal, of which the god and his worshippers 
partake. Throughout the whole ceremony, whether 
we regard the spoken words or the acts performed, 
there is no suggestion of magic and no possibility of 
twisting the ceremony into a piece of magic intended 
to produce some desired result or to exercise any 
constraint over the powers to which the ceremony is 
addressed. The mental attitude is that of thankful- 
ness. 

Now, it is, I venture to suggest, impossible to dis- 
sociate from the first-fruits ceremonials which I 
have described the ceremonies observed by Austra- 
lian black fellows on similar occasions. And it is 
also impossible to overlook the differences between 
the ceremony in Australia and the ceremony else- 
where. In Australia, as elsewhere, when the time of 
year arrives at which the food becomes fit for eating, 



184 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

a ceremony has to be performed before custom per- 
mits the food to be eaten freely. In Australia, as 
elsewhere, a ceremonial eating, a sacramental meal, 
has to take place. But whereas elsewhere the god 
of the community is expressly invited to partake of 
the sacramental meal, even though he be not men- 
tioned by name and though the invitation take the 
curt form of "This is yours to eat," in Australia no 
words whatever are spoken; the person who per- 
forms the ceremony performs it indeed with every 
indication of reverential feeling, he eats solemnly 
and sparingly, that is to say formally and because 
the eating is a matter of ritual, but no reference is 
made by him so far as we know, to any god. How 
then are we to explain the absence of any such 
reference? There seems to me to be only one ex- 
planation which is reasonably possible. It is that 
in the Australian ceremony, which would be perfectly 
intelligible and perfectly in line with the ceremony 
as it occurs everywhere else, the reference to the god 
who is or was invited to partake of the first-fruits has 
in the process of time and, we must add, in the course 
of religious decay, gradually dropped out. The 
invitation may never have been more ample than 
the curt form, "This is yours to eat." Even in the 



SACRIFICE 185 

absence of any verbal invitation whatever, a gesture 
may long have sufficed to indicate what was in the 
mind and was implied by the act of the savage per- 
forming the ceremony. Words may not have been 
felt necessary to explain what every person present 
at the ceremony knew to be the purpose of the rite. 
But in the absence of any verbal formula whatever 
the purpose and meaning of the rite would be apt to 
pass out of mind, to evaporate, even though custom 
maintained, as it does in Australia to this day main- 
tain, the punctual and punctilious performance of 
the outward ceremony. I suggest, therefore, that in 
Australia, as elsewhere, the solemn eating of the first- 
fruits has been a sacramental meal of which both the 
god and his worshippers were partakers. The alter- 
native is to my mind much less probable : it is to use 
the Australian ceremony as it now exists to explain 
the origin of the ceremony as we find it elsewhere. 
In Australia it is not now apparently associated with 
the worship of any god ; therefore it may be argued 
in other countries also it was not originally part of 
the worship of any god either. If, then, it was not 
an act of public worship originally, how are we to 
understand it ? The suggestion is that the fruits of 
the earth or the animals which become the food of 



1 86 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

man are, until they become fit for eating, regarded 
as sacred or taboo, and therefore may not be eaten. 
That suggestion derives some support from the fact 
that in Australia anything that is eaten may be a 
totem and being a totem is taboo. But if it is thus 
sacred, then in order to be eaten it must be "desacral- 
ised," the taboo must be taken off. And it is sug- 
gested that that precisely is what is effected by the 
ceremonial eating of the totem by the headman of the 
totem clan: the totem is desacralised by the mere 
fact that it is formally and ceremonially eaten by the 
headman, after which it may be consumed by others 
as an ordinary article of food. But this explanation 
of the first-fruits ceremony is based upon an assump- 
tion which is contrary to the facts of the case as it 
occurs in Australia. It assumes that the plant or 
the animal until desacralised is taboo to all members 
of the tribe, and that none of them can eat it until it 
has been desacralised by the ceremonial eating. But 
the assumption is false ; the plant or animal is sacred 
and taboo only to members of the clan whose totem 
it is. It is not sacred to the vast majority of the 
tribe, for they have totems of their own ; to them it is 
not sacred or taboo, they may kill it — and they do 
— without breaking any taboo. The ceremonial 



SACRIFICE 187 

eating of the first-fruits raises no taboo as far as the 
tribe generally is concerned, for the plant or animal 
is not taboo to them. As far as the tribe generally is 
concerned, no process of desacralisation takes place 
and none is effected by the ceremonial eating. It is 
the particular totem group alone which is affected 
by the ceremony; and the inference which it seems 
to me preferable to draw is that the ceremonial eating 
of the first-fruits is, or rather has been, in Australia 
what it is elsewhere, viz. an instance of prayer and 
sacrifice in which the worshippers of a god are 
brought into periodic — in this case annual — com- 
munion with their god. The difference between 
the Australian case and others seems to be that in 
the other cases the god who partakes of the first- 
fruits is the god of the whole community, while in 
Australia he is the god of the particular totem group 
and is analogous to the family gods who are wor- 
shipped elsewhere, even where there is a tribal or 
national god to be worshipped as well. 

We are then inclined, for these and other reasons, 
to explain the ceremonial eating of the totem plant 
or animal in Australia by the analogy of the cere- 
monial eating of first-fruits elsewhere, and to regard 
the ceremony as being in all cases an act of worship, 



1 88 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

in which at harvest time the worshippers of a god 
seek communion with him by means of sacrifice 
and prayers of thanksgiving. But if we take this 
view of the sacrifice and prayers offered at harvest 
time, we shall be inclined to regard the rites which 
are performed at seed time, or the period analogous 
to it, as being also possibly, in part, of a religious 
character. In the case of agricultural peoples it is 
beyond doubt that some of the ceremonies are reli- 
gious in character: where the food plant is itself 
regarded as a deity or the mode in which a deity is 
manifested, not only may there be at harvest time a 
sacramental meal in which, as amongst the Aztecs, 
the deity is formally "communicated" to his wor- 
shippers, but at seed time sacrifice and prayer may 
be made to the deity. Such a religious ceremony, 
whatever be the degree of civilisation or semicivili- 
sation which has been reached by those who observe 
the ceremony, does not of course take the place 
of the agricultural operations which are necessary if 
the fruits are to be produced in due season. And 
the combination of the religious rites and the agri- 
cultural operations does not convert the agricul- 
tural operations into magical operations, or prove 
that the religious rites are merely pieces of magic 



SACRIFICE 189 

intended to constrain the superior power of the deity 
concerned. Indeed, if among the operations per- 
formed at seed time we find some that from the 
point of view of modern science are perfectly inef- 
fectual, as vain as eating tiger to make you bold, we 
shall be justified in regarding them as pieces of primi- 
tive science, eventually discarded indeed in the 
progress of advancing knowledge, but originally 
practised (on the principle that like produces like) 
as the natural means of producing the effect desired. 
If we so regard them, we shall escape the error of 
considering them to be magical; and we shall have 
no difficulty in distinguishing them from the reli- 
gious rites which may be combined with them. 
Further, where harvest time is marked by the offer- 
ing of sacrifice and prayers of thanksgiving, we may 
not unreasonably take it that the religious rites ob- 
served at seed time or the period analogous to it are 
in the nature of sacrifice and prayers addressed to 
the appropriate deity to beseech him to favour the 
growth of the plant or animal in question. In a 
word, the practice of giving thanks to a god at harvest 
time for the harvest creates a reasonable presump- 
tion that prayer is offered to him at seed time ; and 
if thanks are given at a period analogous to har- 



I90 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

vest time by a people like the Australian black 
fellows, who have no domesticated plants or animals, 
prayers of the nature of petitions may be offered by 
them at the period analogous to seed time. 

The deity to whom prayers are offered at the one 
period and thanksgiving is made at the other may 
be, as in the case of the Aztec Xilonen, or the Hindoo 
Maize-mother, the spirit of the plant envisaged as a 
deity; or may be, not a " depart mental" deity of 
this kind, but a supreme deity having power over all 
things. But when we turn from the regularly recur- 
ring acts of public worship connected with seed time 
and harvest to the regularly recurring ceremonies at 
which the boys of a tribe are initiated into the duties 
and rights of manhood, it is obvious that the deity 
concerned in them, even if we assume (as is by no 
means necessary) that he was originally " depart- 
ment al" and at first connected merely with the 
growth of a plant or animal, must be regarded at the 
initiation ceremonies as a god having in his care all 
the interests of that tribe of which the boys to be 
initiated are about to become full members. Un- 
mistakable traces of such a deity are found amongst 
the Australian black fellows in the " father of all," 
"the all-father" described by Mr. Howitt. The 



SACRIFICE I91 

worship of the "all-father" is indeed now of a frag 
mentary kind; but it fortunately happens that in 
the case of one tribe, the Euahlayi, we have evidence, 
rescued by Mrs. Langloh Parker, to show that prayer 
is offered to Byamee ; the Euahlayi pray to him for 
long life, because they have kept his law. The 
nature of Byamee's law may safely be inferred from 
the fact that at this festival, both amongst the Euah- 
layi and other Australians, the boys who are 
being initiated are taught the moral laws or the 
customary morality of the tribe. But though pray- 
ers are still offered by the Euahlayi and may have 
at one time been offered by all the Australian tribes, 
there is no evidence at present to show that the prayer 
is accompanied by a sacrifice, as is customary amongst 
tribes whose worship has not disintegrated so much 
as is the case amongst the Australians. 

The ceremonies by which boys are admitted to 
the status of manhood are, probably amongst all 
the peoples of the earth who observe them, of a 
religious character, for the simple reason that the 
community to which the boy is admitted when he 
attains the age of manhood is a community, united 
together by religious bonds as a community wor- 
shipping the same god or gods ; and it is to the wor- 



I92 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

ship and the service of these gods that he is admitted. 
But the ceremonies themselves vary too much to 
allow of our drawing from them any valuable or 
important conclusion as to the nature and import 
of sacrifice as a religious institution. On the other 
hand, the ceremonies observed at harvest time, or 
the analogous period, have, wherever they occur, 
such marked similarity among themselves, and the 
institution of prayer and sacrifice is such a promi- 
nent feature in them, that the evidence they afford 
must be decisive for us in attempting to form a 
theory of sacrifice. Nor can we dissociate the cere- 
monies observed in spring from the harvest cere- 
monies; as Dr. Frazer remarks (G. B., II, 190), 
"Plainly these spring and harvest customs are based 
on the same ancient modes of thought and form 
parts of the same primitive heathendom." What, 
then, are these " ancient modes of thought" and 
what the primitive customs based upon them? 
We may, I think, classify them in four groups. 
If we are to take first those instances in which the 
"ancient mode of thought" is most clearly expressed 
— whether because they are the most fully developed 
or because they retain the ancient mode most faith- 
fully and with the least disintegration — we must 



SACRIFICE 193 

turn to ancient Mexico and Peru. In Mexico 
a paste idol or dough image of the god was made; 
the priest hurled a dart into its breast ; and this was 
called the killing of the god, "so that his body might 
be eat en.' ' The dough image was broken and the 
pieces were given in the manner of a communion to 
the people, "who received it with such tears, fear, 
and reverence, as it was an admirable thing/' says 
Father Acosta, "saying that they did eat the flesh 
and bones of God." Or, again, an image of the 
goddess Chicomecoatl was made of dough and exhi- 
bited by the priest, saying, "This is your god." 
All kinds of maize, beans, etc., were offered to it and 
then were eaten in the temple "in a general scram- 
ble, take who could." In Peru ears of maize were 
dressed in rich garments and worshipped as the 
Mother of the Maize ; or little loaves of maize mingled 
with the blood of sheep were made ; the priest gave 
to each of the people a morsel of these loaves, " and 
all did receive and eat these pieces," and prayed that 
the god "would show them favour, granting them 
children and happy years and abundance and all 
that they required." In this, the first group of 
instances, it is plain beyond all possibility of gain- 
saying that the spring and harvest customs consist 
o 



194 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

of the worship of a god, of sacrifice and prayers to 
him, and of a communion which bound the wor- 
shippers to one another and to him. 

Our second group of instances consists of cases 
in which the corn or dough or paste is not indeed 
made into the form or image of a god, but, as Dr. 
Frazer says (G. B. II, 318), "the new corn is itself 
eaten sacramentally, that is, as the body of the corn 
spirit." The spirit thus, worshipped may not yet 
have acquired a proper name ; the only designation 
used may have been such a one as the Hindoo 
Bhogaldai, meaning simply Cotton-mother. In- 
deed, even amongst the Peruvians, the goddess had 
not yet acquired a proper name, but was known 
only as the Mother of the Maize. But precisely 
because the stage illustrated in our second group 
of instances is not so highly developed as in Mexico 
or Peru it is much more widely spread. It is found 
in the East Indian island of Buro, amongst the 
Alfoors of Minahassa, in the Celebes, in the Neil- 
gherry Hills of South India, in the Hindoo Koosh, 
in Indo-China, on the Niger, amongst the Zulus 
and the Pondos, and amongst the Creek, Seminole, 
and Natchez Indians (ib. 321-342). In this, the 
second group of instances, then, though the god 



SACRIFICE I95 

may have no special, proper, name, and though no 
image of him is made out of the dough or paste, 
still "the new corn is itself eaten sacramentally, 
that is as the body of the corn spirit"; by means of 
the sacramental eating, of sacrifice and prayer, 
communion between the god and his worshippers 
is renewed and maintained. 

The third group of instances consists of the 
harvest customs of northern Europe — the harvest 
supper and the rites of the Corn-mother or the Corn- 
maiden or the Kern Baby. It can scarcely be con- 
tended that these rites and customs, so far as they 
survive at the present day, retain, if they ever had, 
any religious value; they are performed as a matter 
of tradition and custom and not because any one 
knows why they are performed. But that they 
originally had a meaning — even though now it has 
evaporated — cannot be doubted. Nor can it be 
doubted that the meaning, if it is to be recovered, 
must be recovered by means of the comparative 
method. And, if the comparative method is to 
be applied, the Corn-mother of northern Europe 
cannot be dissociated from the Maize-mother of 
ancient Peru. But if we go thus far, then we must, 
with Dr. Frazer (ib. 288), recognise "clearly the 



I96 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

sacramental character of the harvest -supper," in 
which, "as a substitute for the real flesh of the divine 
being, bread and dumplings are made and eaten 
sacrament ally.' ' Thus, once more, harvest cus- 
toms testify in northern Europe, as elsewhere, to 
the fact that there was once a stated, annual, period 
at which communion between the god and his wor- 
shipper was sought by prayer and sacrifice. 

The North-European harvest customs are further 
interesting and important because, if they are clearly 
connected on the one hand with the groups of in- 
stances already given, they are also connected on 
the other with the group to which we have yet to call 
attention. Thus far the wheat or maize, if not eaten 
in the form of little loaves or cakes, has been made 
into a dough image, or else the ears of maize have 
been dressed in rich garments to indicate that they 
represent the Mother of the Maize; and in Europe 
also both forms of symbolism are found. But in 
northern Europe, the corn spirit is also believed 
to be manifested, Dr. Frazer says, in "the animal 
which is present in the corn and is caught or killed 
in the last sheaf." The animal may be a wolf, dog, 
cock, hare, cat, goat, bull, cow, horse, or pig. "The 
animal is slain and its flesh and blood are partaken 



SACRIFICE I97 

of by the harvesters," and, Dr. Frazer says, " these 
customs bring out clearly the sacramental character 
of the harvest supper." Now, this manifestation 
of the corn spirit in animal form is not confined to 
Europe; it occurs for instance in Guinea and in 
all the provinces and districts of China. And it is 
important as forming a link between the agricul- 
tural and the pre-agricultural periods; in Dr. 
Frazer's words, "hunting and pastoral tribes, as 
well as agricultural peoples, have been in the habit 
of killing their gods" (ib. 366). In the pastoral 
period, as well as in agricultural times, the god who 
is worshipped by the tribe and with whom the tribe 
seeks communion by means of prayer and sacrifice, 
may manifest himself in animal form, and "the 
animal is slain and its flesh and blood are partaken 
of." 

We now come to the fourth and the last of our 
groups of instances. It consists of the rites observed 
by Australian tribes. Amongst these tribes too 
there is what Dr. Frazer terms "a sacramental 
eating" of the totem plant or animal. Thus Central 
Australian black men of the kangaroo totem eat 
a little kangaroo flesh, as a sacrament (Spencer and 
Gillen, p. 204 ff.). Now, it is impossible, I think, to 



I98 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

dissociate the Australian rite, to separate this fourth 
group, from the three groups already described. 
In Australia, as in the other cases, the customs are 
observed in spring and harvest time, and in harvest 
time, in Australia as well as elsewhere, there is a 
solemn and sparing eating of the plant or animal ; 
and, in Dr. Frazer's words, " plainly these spring 
and harvest customs are based on the same ancient 
modes of thought, and form part of the same primi- 
tive heathendom." What, then, is this ancient and 
primitive mode of thought ? In all the cases except 
the Australian, the thought manifestly implied and 
expressed is that by the solemn eating of the plant 
or the animal, or the dough image or paste idol, or 
the little loaves, the community enters into com- 
munion with its god, or renews communion with him. 
On this occasion the Peruvians prayed for children, 
happy years and abundance. On this occasion, even 
among the Australians, the Euahlayi tribe pray for 
long life, because they have kept Byamee's law. 
It would not, therefore, be unreasonable to interpret 
the Australian custom by the same ancient mode of 
thought which explains the custom wherever else 
— and that is all over the world — it is found. But 
perhaps, if we can find some other interpretation 



SACRIFICE I99 

of the Australian custom, we should do better to 
reverse the process and explain the spring and har- 
vest customs which are found elsewhere by means of, 
and in accordance with, the Australian custom. 
Now another interpretation of the Australian custom 
has been put forward byTDr. Frazer. He treats the 
Australian ceremony as being a piece of pure magic, 
the purpose of which is to promote the growth and 
increase of the plants and animals which provide 
the black fellows with food. But if we start from 
this point of view, we must go further and say that 
amongst other peoples than the Australian the kill- 
ing of the representative animal of the spirit of 
vegetation is, in Dr. Frazer's words, "a magical rite 
intended to assure the revival of nature in spring.' ' 
And if that is the nature of the rite which appears 
in northern Europe as the harvest supper, it will 
also be the nature of the rite as it appears both in 
our second group of instances, where the corn is 
eaten "as the body of the corn-spirit," and in the 
first group, where the dough image or paste idol was 
eaten in Mexico as the flesh and bones of the god. 
That this line of thought runs through Dr. Frazer's 
Golden Bough, in its second edition, is indicated by 
the fact that the rite is spoken of throughout as a 



200 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

sacrament. That the Mexican rite as described 
in our first group is sacramental, is clear. Of the 
rites which form our second group of instances, Dr. 
Frazer says that the corn-spirit, or god, "is killed 
in the person of his representative and eaten sacra- 
mentally," and that "the new corn is itself eaten 
sacramentally ; that is, as the body of the corn-spirit" 
(p. 318). Of the North European rites, again, he 
says, "the animal is slain and its flesh and blood are 
partaken of by the harvesters" — "these customs 
bring out clearly the sacramental character of the 
harvest supper" — "as a substitute for the real 
flesh of the divine being, bread or dumplings are 
made in his image and eaten sacramentally." 
Finally, even when speaking of the Australians as 
men who have no gods to worship, and with whom 
the rite is pure and unadulterated magic, he yet 
describes the rite as a sacrament. 

Now if, on the one hand, from its beginning amongst 
the Australians to the form which it finally took 
amongst the Mexicans the rite is, as Dr. Frazer 
systematically calls it, a sacrament ; and if, on the 
other, it is, in Dr. Frazer's words, "a magical rite 
intended to assure the revival of nature in spring," 
then the conclusion which the reader cannot help 



SACRIFICE 20 1 

drawing is that a sacrament, or this sacrament at 
least, is in its origin, and in its nature throughout, 
a piece of magic. Religion is but magic written 
in different characters ; and for those who can inter- 
pret them it spells the same thing. But though this 
is the conclusion to which Dr. Frazer's argument 
leads, and to which in the first edition of his Golden 
Bough it clearly seemed to point; in the preface to 
the second edition he formally disavows it. He 
recognises that religion does not spring from magic, 
but is fundamentally opposed to it. A sacrament, 
therefore, we may infer, cannot be a piece of magic. 
The Australian sacrament, therefore, as Dr. Frazer 
calls it, cannot, we should be inclined to say, be a 
piece of magic. But Dr. Frazer still holds that the 
Australian rite or sacrament is pure magic — reli- 
gious it cannot be, for in Dr. Frazer's view the Aus- 
tralians know no religion and have no gods. 

Now if the rite as it occurs in Australia is pure 
magic, and if religion is not a variety of magic but 
fundamentally different from it, then the rite which, 
as it occurs everywhere else, is religious, cannot be 
derived from, or a variety of, the Australian piece of 
magic; and the spring and harvest customs which 
are found in Australia cannot be " based on the 



202 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

same ancient modes of thought or form part of the 
same primitive heathendom" as the sacramental 
rites which are found everywhere else in the world. 
The solemn annual eating of the totem plant or 
animal in Australia must have a totally different 
basis from that on which the sacrament and com- 
munion stands in every other part of the globe: 
in Australia it is based on magic, elsewhere on that 
which is, according to Dr. Frazer, fundamentally 
different and opposed to magic, viz. religion. Before, 
however, we commit ourselves to this conclusion, 
we may be allowed to ask, What is it that compels 
us thus to sever the Australian from the other forms 
of the rite? The reply would seem to be that, 
whereas the other forms are admittedly religious, 
the Australian is "a magical rite intended to assure 
the revival of nature in spring." Now, if that were 
really the nature of the Australian rite, we might 
have to accept the conclusion to which we hesitate 
to commit ourselves. But, as a matter of fact, the 
Australian rite is not intended to assure the revival 
of nature in spring, and has nothing magical about 
it. It is perfectly true that in spring in Australia 
certain proceedings are performed which are based 
upon the principle that like produces like; and 



SACRIFICE 203 

that these proceedings are, by students of the science 
of religion, termed — perhaps incorrectly — mag- 
ical. But these spring customs are quite different 
from the harvest customs; and it is the harvest 
customs which constitute the link between the rite 
in Australia and the rite in the rest of the world. 
The crucial question, therefore, is whether the Aus- 
tralian harvest rite is magical, or is even based on 
the principle that like produces like. And the 
answer is that it is plainly not. The harvest rite 
in Australia consists, as we know it now, simply in 
the fact that at the appointed time a little of the 
totem plant or animal is solemnly and sparingly 
eaten by the headman of the totem. The solemnity 
with which the rite is performed is unmistakable, 
and may well be termed religious. And no attempt 
even, so far as I am aware, has been made to show 
that this solemn eating is regarded as magic by the 
performers of the rite, or how it can be so regarded 
by students of the science of religion. Until the 
attempt is made and made successfully, we are more 
than justified in refusing to regard the rite as magical ; 
we are bound to refuse to regard it as such. But if 
the rite is not magical — and a fortiori if it is, as 
Dr. Frazer terms it, sacramental — then it is reli- 



204 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

gious; and the ancient mode of thought, forming 
part of primitive heathendom, which is at the base 
of the rite, is the conviction that manifests itself 
wherever the rite continues to live, viz. that by prayer 
and sacrifice the worshippers in any community are 
brought into communion with the god they worship. 
The rite is, in truth, what Dr. Frazer terms it as it 
occurs in Australia — a sacrament. But not even 
in Australia is a sacrament a piece of magic. 

In the animistic stage of the evolution of humanity, 
the only causes man can conceive of are animated 
things; and, in the presence of any occurrence 
sufficiently striking to arrest his attention, the ques- 
tions which present themselves to his mind are, Who 
did this thing, and why ? Occurrences which arrest 
the attention of the community are occurrences 
which affect the community; and in a low stage of 
evolution, when the most pressing of all practical 
questions is how to live, the occurrences which 
most effectually arrest attention are those which 
affect the food supply of the community. If, then, 
the food supply fails, the occurrence is due to some 
of the personal, or quasi-personal, powers by whom 
the community is surrounded; and the reason why 
such power so acted is found in the wrath which 



SACRIFICE 205 

must have actuated him. The situation is abnormal, 
for famine is abnormal; and it indicates anger and 
wrath on the part of the power who brought it 
about. But it also implies that when things go on 
in the normal way, — when the relations between 
the spirit and the community are normal, — the 
attitude of the spirit to the community is peaceable 
and friendly. Not only, however, does the com- 
munity desire to renew peaceable and friendly rela- 
tions, where pestilence or famine show that they 
have been disturbed: the community also desires 
to benefit by them when they are in their normal 
condition. The spirits that can disturb the normal 
conditions by sending pestilence or famine can also 
assist the community in undertakings, the success 
of which is indispensable if the community is to 
maintain its existence; for instance, those under- 
takings on which the food supply of the community 
depends. Hence the petitions which are put up 
at seed time, or, in the pre-agricultural period, at 
seasons analogous to seed time. Hence, also, the 
rites at harvest time or the analogous season, rites 
which are instituted and developed for the purpose 
of maintaining friendly relation and communion 
between the community, and the spirit whose favour 



206 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

is sought and whose anger is dreaded by the com- 
munity. Such sacrificial rites may indeed be inter- 
preted as the making of gifts to the gods; and they 
do, as a matter of fact, often come so to be regarded 
by those who perform them. From this undeniable 
fact the inference may then be drawn, and by many 
students of the science of religion it is inferred, 
that from the beginning there was in such sacrificial 
rites no other intention than to bribe the god or to 
purchase his favour and the good things he had to 
give. But the inference, which, when properly 
limited, has some truth in it, becomes misleading 
when put forward as being the whole truth. Unless 
there were some truth in it, the rite of sacrifice could 
never have developed into the form which was 
denounced by the Hebrew prophets and mercilessly 
exposed by Plato. But had that been the whole 
truth, the rite would have been incapable of discharg- 
ing the really religious function which it has in its 
history fulfilled. That function has been to place 
and maintain the society which practises it in com- 
munion with its god. Doubtless in the earliest 
stages of the history of the rite, the communion thus 
felt to be established was prized and was mainly 
sought for the external blessings which were believed 



SACRIFICE 207 

to follow from it, or, as a means to avert the public 
disasters which a breach of communion entailed. 
Doubtless it was only by degrees, and by slow 
degrees, that the communion thus established came 
to be regarded as being in itself the end which the 
rite of sacrifice was truly intended to attain. But 
the communion of the worshippers with their god 
was not a purpose originally foreign to the rite, and 
which, when introduced, transformed the rite from 
what it at first was into something radically different. 
On the contrary, it was present, even though not 
prominent or predominant, from the beginning; 
and the rite, as a religious institution, followed 
different lines of evolution, according as the one 
aspect or the other was developed. Where the as- 
pect under which the sacrificial rite was regarded 
was that the offering was a gift made to the deity 
in order to secure some specified temporal advantage, 
the religious value of the rite diminished to the 
vanishing point in the eyes both of those who, like 
Plato, could see the intrinsic absurdity of pretending 
to make gifts to Him from whom alone all good 
things come, and of those who felt that the sacrificial 
rite so conceived did not afford the spiritual com- 
munion for which they yearned. Where even the 



208 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

sacrificial rite was regarded as a means whereby 
communion between the worshipper and his god was 
attained or maintained, the emphasis might be 
thrown on the rite and its due performance rather 
than on the spiritual communion of which it was 
the condition. That is to say, with the growth of 
formalism attention was concentrated on the ritual 
and correspondingly withdrawn from the prayer 
which, from the beginning, had been of the essence 
of the rite. By the rite of sacrifice the community 
had always been brought into the presence of the 
god it worshipped; and, in the prayers then offered 
on behalf of the society, the society had been brought 
into communion with its god. From that com- 
munion it was possible to fall away, even though 
the performance of the rite was maintained. The 
very object of that communion might be misin- 
terpreted and mistaken to be a means merely to 
temporal blessings for the community, or even to 
personal advantages for the individual. Or the 
punctilious performance of each and every detail 
of the rite might tend to become an end in itself 
and displace the spiritual communion, the attain- 
ment of which had been from the beginning the 
highest, even if not the only or the most prominent, 



SACRIFICE 209 

end which the rite might subserve. The difference 
between the possibilities which the rite might have 
realised and the actual purposes for which it had 
come to be used before the birth of Christ is a dif- 
ference patent to the mqst casual observer of the 
facts. The dissatisfaction felt alike by Plato and 
the Hebrew prophets with the rite as it had come 
to be practised may be regarded, if we choose so 
to regard it, as the necessary consequence of pre- 
existing facts, and as necessarily entailing the re- 
jection or the reconstitution of the rite. As a 
matter of history, the rite was reconstituted and not 
rejected; and as reconstituted it became the central 
fact of the Christian religion. It became the means 
whereby, through Christ, all men might be brought 
to God. We may say, if we will, that a new meaning 
was put into the rite, or that its true meaning was 
now made manifest. The facts themselves clearly 
indicate that from the beginning the rite was the 
means whereby a society sought or might seek com- 
munion with its god. They also indicate that the 
rite of animal sacrifice came to be found insufficient 
as a means. It was through our Lord that mankind 
learned what sacrifice was needed — learned to 
" offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our 



210 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively 
sacrifice unto thee." That is the sacrifice Christ 
showed us the example of; that is the example 
which the missionary devotes himself to follow and 
to teach. 



MORALITY 

In this lecture I propose to consider the question 
whether morality is based on religion or religion 
on morality. It is a question which may be ap- 
proached from the point of view either of philosophy 
or of history. Quite recently it has been treated 
from the former point of view by Professor Hoffding 
in The Philosophy of Religion (translated into Eng- 
lish, 1906) ; and from the point of view of the his- 
tory of morality by Mr. Hobhouse in his Morals 
in Evolution (1906). It may, of course, also be quite 
properly approached from the point of view of the 
history of religion; and from whatever standpoint 
it is treated, the question is one of importance for the 
missionary, both because of its intrinsic interest for 
the philosophy of religion, and because its discussion 
is apt to proceed on a mistaken view of facts in the 
history of religion. About those facts and their mean- 
ing, the missionary, who is to be properly equipped for 
his work, should be in no doubt : a right view and 
a proper estimate of the facts are essential both for 

211 



212 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

his practical work and for the theoretical justifica- 
tion of his position. 

One answer to the question before us is that 
morality is the basal fact — the bottom fact : if we 
regard the question historically, we shall find that 
morality came first and religion afterwards; and, 
even if that were not so, we should find that as a 
matter of logic and philosophy religion presupposes 
morality — religion may, for a time, be the lever 
that moves the world, but it would be powerless if 
it had not a fulcrum, and that fulcrum is morality. 
So long and so far as religion operates beneficially 
on the world, it does so simply because it supports 
and reenforces morality. But the time is not far 
distant, and may even now be come, when morality 
no longer requires any support from religion — and 
then religion becomes useless, nay! an encum- 
brance which must either fall off or be lopped off. 
If, therefore, morality can stand by itself, and all 
along has not merely stood by itself, but has really 
upheld religion, in what is morality rooted? The 
answer is that morality has its roots, not in the com- 
mand that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart and all thy soul, but in human solidar- 
ity, in humanity regarded as a spiritual whole. To 



MORALITY 213 

this conclusion, it is said, the history of recent phi- 
losophy has steadily been moving. If the move- 
ment had taken place in only one school of philo- 
sophic thought, it might have been a movement 
running into a side-track. But it is the direction 
taken by schools so different in their presuppositions 
and their methods as that of Hegel and that of Comte ; 
and it is the undesigned coincidence of their ten- 
dency, which at first could never have been surmised, 
that carries with it a conviction of its correctness. 
Human solidarity, humanity regarded as a spiritual 
whole, may be called, as Hegel calls it, self-conscious 
spirit; or you may call it, as Comte calls it, the 
Mind of Humanity — it is but the collective wisdom 
"of a common humanity with a common aim" ; and, 
that being so, morality is rooted, not in the will and 
the love of a beneficent and omnipotent Providence, 
but in the self-realising spirit in man setting up its 
"common aim" at morality. The very conception 
of a beneficent and omnipotent God — having now 
done its work as an aid to morality — must now be 
put aside, because it stands in the way of our recog- 
nising what is the real spiritual whole, besides which 
there is none other spirit, viz. the self -realising spirit 
in man. That spirit is only realising; it is not yet 



214 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

realised. It is in process of realisation ; and the con- 
ception of it, as in process of realisation, enables it to 
be brought into harmony, or rather reveals its inner 
harmony, with the notion of evolution. There is 
nothing outside evolution, no being to whom evo- 
lution is presented as a spectacle or by whom, as a 
process, it is directed. " Being itself," as Hoffding 
says {Problems of Philosophy, p. 136), "is to be con- 
ceived as in process of becoming, of evolution." 
The spirit in man, as we have just said, is the real 
spiritual whole, and it is self -realising ; it is evolving 
and progressing both morally and rationally. In 
Hoff ding's words "Being itself becomes more ra- 
tional than before" (ib., p. 137). "Being itself is 
not ready-made but still incomplete, and rather to 
be conceived as a continual becoming, like the indi- 
vidual personality and like knowledge" (ib., p. 120). 
We may say, then, that being is becoming rationalised 
and moralised as and because the spirit in man 
realises itself. For a time the process of moralisa- 
tion and self-realisation was worked by and through 
the conception of a beneficent and omnipotent god. 
That conception was, it would seem, a hypothesis, 
valuable as long it was a working hypothesis, but 
to be cast aside now that humanitarianism is found 



MORALITY 215 

more adequate to the facts and more in harmony 
with the consistent application of the theory of evo- 
lution. We have, then, to consider whether it is 
adequate to the facts, whether, when we regard the 
facts of the history of religion, we do find that morality 
comes first and religion Tater. 

"What," Mr. Hobhouse enquires in his Morals 
in Evolution (II, 74), "What is the ethical character 
of early religion ?" and his reply is that "in the first 
stage we find that spirits, as such, are not concerned 
with morality." That was also the answer which 
had previously been given by Professor Hoffding, 
who says in his Philosophy of Religion: "in the 
lowest forms of it . . . religion cannot be said to 
have any ethical significance" (p. 323). Originally, 
the gods were "purely natural forces which could be 
defied or evaded," though eventually they "became 
ethical powers whom men neither could nor wished 
to defy" (p. 324). This first stage of early religion 
seems on the terms of the hypothesis to be supposed 
to be found in the period of animism and f etichism ; 
and "the primitive conception of spirit" is, Mr. 
Hobhouse says (II, 16), of something "feeling and 
thinking like a rather stupid man, and open like him 
to supplication, exhortation, or intimidation." If 



2l6 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

that is so, then Professor Hoffding may be justified 
in saying that in the lowest forms of religion "the 
gods appear as powers on which man is dependent, 
but not as patterns of conduct or administrators of 
an ethical world order" (p. 324). Now, in the period 
termed animistic because inanimate things are 
supposed to be animated and actuated by spirits, 
it may be that many or most of such spirits are sup- 
posed to feel and think like a rather stupid man, and 
therefore to be capable of being cajoled, deluded, in- 
timidated, and castigated by the human being who 
desires to make use of them. But it is not all 
such spirits that are worshipped then. Indeed, 
it is impossible, Mr. Hobhouse says (II, 15), 
that any such spirit could be "an object of wor- 
ship in our sense of the term." Worship implies 
the superiority of the object worshipped to the 
person worshipping. But, though not an object 
of worship in our sense of the term, the spirit that 
could be deluded, intimidated, and castigated was, 
according to Mr. Hobhouse, "the object of a religious 
cult" on the part of the man who believed that he 
could and did intimidate and castigate the spirit. 
Probably, however, most students of the science of 
religion would agree that a cult which included or 



MORALITY 217 

allowed intimidation and castigation of the object 
of the cult was as little entitled to be termed religious 
as it is to be called worship. In the period of ani- 
mism, then, either there was no religious cult, no 
worship in our sense of the term; or, if there was 
religion, then the spirit worshipped was worshipped 
as a being higher than man. Whether man has 
at any time been without religion is a question on 
which there is here no need to enter. The allega- 
tion we are now considering is that whenever reli- 
gion does appear, then in its first and earliest stage 
it is not concerned with morality; and the ground 
for that allegation is that the spirits of the animistic 
period have nothing to do with morality or conduct. 
Now, it may be that these spirits which animate 
inanimate things are not concerned with morality; 
but then neither are they worshipped, nor is the 
relation between them and man religious. Religion 
implies a god; and a spirit to be a god must have 
worshippers, a community of worshippers — whether 
that community be a nation, a tribe, or a family. 
Further, it is as the protector of the interests of that 
community — however small — that the god is wor- 
shipped by the community. The indispensable 
condition of religion is the existence of a community; 



2l8 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

and from the beginning man must have lived in some 
sort of community, — whether a family or a horde, — 
for the period of helpless infancy is so long in the case 
of human beings that without some sort of perman- 
ent community the race could not be perpetuated. 
The indispensable condition of religion, therefore, 
has always existed from the time when man was 
man. Further, whatever the form of community 
in which man originally dwelt, it was only in the 
community and by means of the community that 
the individual could exist — that is to say, if the 
interest of any one individual conflicted or was sup- 
posed to conflict with the interests of the commu- 
nity, then the interests of the community must pre- 
vail, if the community was to exist. Here, then, 
from the beginning we have the second condition 
indispensable for the existence of religion, viz. the 
possibility that the conduct of some member of the 
community might not be the conduct required by 
the interests or supposed interests of the community, 
and prescribed by the custom of the community. 
In the case of such divergence of interests and con- 
duct, the being worshipped by the community was 
necessarily, as being the god of the community, and 
receiving the worship of the community, on the side 



MORALITY 219 

of the community and against the member who 
violated the custom of the community. But, at this 
period in the history of humanity, the morality of 
the community was the custom of the community; 
and the god of the community from the first neces- 
sarily upheld the custom, that is, the morality of the 
community. Spirits "as such," that is to say, spirits 
which animated inanimate things but which were not 
the protectors of any human community, were, for 
the very reason that they were not the gods of any 
community, "not concerned with morality." Spirits, 
however, which were the protectors of a community 
necessarily upheld the customs and therefore the 
morality of the community; they were not "without 
ethical significance." It was an essential part of 
the very conception of such spirits — of spirits stand- 
ing in this relation to the community — that they 
were "ethical powers." Hoffding's dictum that 
"the gods appear as powers on which man is de- 
pendent, but not as patterns of conduct or adminis- 
trators of an ethical world order" (p. 323), overlooks 
the fact that in the earliest times not only are gods 
powers on which man is dependent, but powers 
which enforce the conduct required by the custom 
of the community and sanction the ethical order as 



220 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

far as it has then been revealed. The fact that 
"the worship of the family, of the clan, or of the 
nation is shared in by all," not merely "helps to 
nourish a feeling of solidarity which may acquire 
ethical significance," as Hoffding says (p. 325), it 
creates a solidarity which otherwise would not exist. 
If there were no worship shared in by all, there 
would be no religious solidarity; and, judging from 
the very general, if not universal, occurrence of reli- 
gion in the lowest races as well as the highest, we 
may conjecture that without religious solidarity 
a tribe found it hard or impossible to survive in the 
struggle for existence. That religious solidarity 
however is not, as Hoffding suggests, something 
which may eventually "acquire ethical significance"; 
it is in its essence and from the beginning the wor- 
ship of a god who punishes the community for the 
ethical transgression of its members, because they 
are not merely violations of the custom of the 
community, but offences against him. When Hoff- 
ding says (p. 328) "religious faith . . . assumes 
an independent human ethic, which has, as a matter 
of fact, developed historically under the practical 
influence of the ethical feeling of man," he seems to 
overlook the fact that as a matter of history human 



MORALITY 221 

ethics have always been based — rightly or wrongly 
— on religious faith, that moral transgressions have 
always been regarded as not merely wrongs done 
to a man's neighbour, but also as offences against 
the god or gods of the community, that the person 
suffering from foul wrong for which he can get no 
human redress has always appealed from man to 
God, and that the remorse of the wrong-doer who 
has evaded human punishment has always taken 
shape in the fear of what God may yet do. 

Those who desire to prove that at the present day 
morality can exist apart from religion, and that in 
the future it will do so, finding its basis in humani- 
tarianism and not in religion, are moved to show 
that as a matter of historic fact religion and morality 
have been things apart. We have examined the asser- 
tion that religion in its lowest forms is not concerned 
with morality; and we have attempted to show 
that the god of a community, or the spirit worshipped 
by a community, is necessarily a being conceived as 
concerned with the interests of the community and 
as hostile to those who violate the customs — which 
is to transgress the morality — of the community. 
But even if this be admitted, it may still be said that 
it does not in the least disprove the assertion that 



222 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

morality existed before religion did. The theory 
we are examining freely admits that religion is 
supposed, in certain stages of the history of humanity, 
to reenforce morality and to be necessary in the inter- 
est of morals, though eventually it is found that 
morality needs no such support ; and not only needs 
now no such support but never did need it ; and the 
fact that it did not need it is shown by demonstrating 
the existence of morality before religion existed. 
If, then, it be admitted that religion from the mo- 
ment it first appeared reenforced morality, and did 
not pass through a non-moral period first, still mo- 
rality may have existed before religion was evolved, 
and must have so existed if morality and religion 
are things essentially apart. What evidence then is 
there on the point? We find Mr. Hobhouse saying 
(I, 80) that "at almost, if not quite, the lowest stages" 
of human development there are "certain actions 
which are resented as involving the community as 
a whole in misfortune and danger. These include, 
besides actual treason, conduct which brings upon 
the people the wrath of God, or of certain spirits, or 
which violates some mighty and mysterious taboo. 
The actions most frequently regarded in this light are 
certain breaches of the marriage law and witchcraft.' ' 



MORALITY 223 

These offences, we are told (ib., 82), endanger the 
community itself, and the punishment is "prompted 
by the sense of a danger to the whole community.' ' 
Here, then, from the beginning we find that offences 
against the common good are punished, not simply 
as such, but as misconduct bringing on the commu- 
nity, and not merely on the offender, the wrath of gods 
or spirits. In other words — Mr. Hobhouse's words, 
p. 119 — "in the evolution of public justice, we find 
that at the outset the community interferes mainly 
on what we may call supernatural grounds only with 
actions which are regarded as endangering its own 
existence." We may then fairly say that if the com- 
munity inflicts punishments mainly on supernatural 
grounds from the time when the evolution of public 
justice first begins, then morality from its very be- 
ginning was reenforced — indeed prompted — by 
religion. The morality was indeed only the custom 
of the community; but violation of the custom was 
from the beginning regarded as a religious offence 
and was punished on supernatural grounds. 

The view that morality and religion are essen- 
tially distinct, that morality not only can stand alone, 
without support from religion, but has in reality 
always stood without such support — however much 



224 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

the fact has been obscured by religious preposses- 
sions — this view receives striking confirmation 
from the current and generally accepted theory of the 
origin and nature of justice. That theory traces 
the origin of justice back to the feeling of resentment 
experienced by the individual against the particular 
cause of his pain (Westermarck, Origin and Develop- 
ment of the Moral Ideas, I, 22). Resentment leads 
to retaliation and takes the form of revenge. Ven- 
geance, at first executed by the person injured (or 
by his kin, if he be killed), comes eventually, if 
slowly, to be taken out of the hands of the person 
injured or his avengers, and to be exercised by the 
State in the interests of the community and in fur- 
therance, not of revenge, but of justice and the good 
of society. Thus not only the origin of justice, 
but the whole course of its growth and develop- 
ment, is entirely independent of religion and reli- 
gious considerations. Throughout, the individual 
and society are the only parties involved; the gods 
do not appear — or, if they do appear, they are intru- 
sive and superfluous. If this be the true view of 
the history and nature of justice, it may — and 
probably must — be the truth about the whole of 
morality and not only about justice. We have but 



MORALITY 225 

to follow Dr. Westermarck (ib., p. 21) in grouping 
the moral emotions under the two heads of emo- 
tions of approval and emotions of disapproval, we 
have but to note with him that both groups belong 
to the class of retributive emotions, and we see 
that the origin and history of justice are typical 
of the origin and history of morals: morality in 
general, just as much as justice in particular, both 
originates independently of religion and developes 
— where moral progress is made — independently 
of religion. 

Let us now proceed to examine this view of the 
relation of religion and morality and to consider 
whether their absolute independence of each other 
is historic fact. It traces back justice to the feeling 
of resentment experienced by the individual; but 
if the individual ever existed by himself and apart 
from society, there could neither then be justice nor 
anything analogous to justice, for justice implies, 
not merely a plurality of individuals, but a society ; 
it is a social virtue. The individual existing by 
himself and apart from society is not a historic fact 
but an impossible abstraction — a conception essen- 
tially false because it expresses something which 
neither exists nor has existed nor could possibly 
Q 



226 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

exist. The origin of justice — or of any virtue — 
cannot be found in the impossible and self-contra- 
dictory conception of the individual existing apart 
from society; it cannot be found in a mere plurality 
of such individuals: it can only be found in a 
society — whether that society have the organisation 
of a family, a tribe, or a nation. Justice in particu- 
lar and morality in general, like religion, imply 
the existence of a society; neither is a merely indi- 
vidual affair. Justice is, as Mr. Hobhouse states, 
" public action taken for the sake of public safety" 
(I, 83): it is, from the outset of its history, public 
action ; and back of that we cannot go, for the indi- 
vidual did not, as a matter of history, exist before 
society, and could not so have existed. 

In the next place, justice is not the resentment of 
any individual, it is the sentiment of the community 
expressing itself in public action, taken not for the 
sake of any individual, but for the sake of public 
safety. Its object from the beginning is not the grati- 
fication of individual resentment, but the safety and 
welfare of the community which takes common 
action. Proof of this, if proof were needed, would 
be found in the fact that the existence of the indi- 
vidual, as such, is not recognised. Not only does 



MORALITY 227 

the community which has suffered in the wrong done 
to any of its members take action as a community ; 
it proceeds, not against the individual who has in- 
flicted the wrong, but against the community to 
which he belongs. "The wrong done," is, as Mr. 
Hobhouse says (I, 91), "the act of the family or clan 
and may be avenged on any member of that family 
or clan." There is collective responsibility for the 
wrong done, just as there is collective responsibility 
for righting it. 

If, now, we enquire, What are the earliest offences 
against which public action is taken? and why? 
we may remember that Mr. Hobhouse has stated 
them to be witchcraft and breaches of the marriage 
law; and that the punishment of those offences 
corresponds, as he has said, "roughly to our own 
administration of justice" (I, 81). Now, in the case 
of breaches of the marriage laws — mating with a 
cousin on the mother's side instead of with a cousin 
on the father's side, marrying into a forbidden 
class — it is obvious that there is no individual who 
has suffered injury and that there is no individual 
to experience resentment. It is the community 
that suffers or is expected to suffer; and it expects 
to suffer, because it, in the person of one of its mem- 



228 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

bers, has offended. Collectively it is responsible 
for the misdeeds of its members. Whom, then, has 
it offended ? To whom is it responsible ? Who will 
visit it with punishment, unless it makes haste to set 
itself right ? The answer given by a certain tribe of 
the Sea Dyaks makes the matter clear: they, Mr. 
St. John tells us in his Life in the Forests of the Far 
East (I, 63, quoted by Westermarck, I, 49), "are of 
opinion that an unmarried girl proving with child 
must be offensive to the superior powers, who, in- 
stead of always chastising the individual, punish the 
tribe by misfortunes happening to its members. 
They therefore on the discovery of the pregnancy 
fine the lovers, and sacrifice a pig to propitiate 
offended heaven, and to avert that sickness or those 
misfortunes that might otherwise follow." That is, 
of course, only one instance. But we may safely 
say that the marriage law is generally ascribed to 
the ordinance of the gods, even in the lowest tribes, 
and that breaches of it are offences against heaven. 
It is unnecessary to prove, it need only be men- 
tioned, that witchcraft is conspicuously offensive 
to the religious sentiment, and is punished as an 
offence against the god or gods. When, then, we 
consider the origin and nature of justice, not from 



MORALITY 229 

an abstract and a priori point of view, but in the light 
of historic fact, so far from finding that it originates 
and operates in complete independence of religion, 
we discover that from the beginning the offences 
with which the justice of the primitive community 
deals are offences, not against the community, but 
against heaven. "In the evolution of public jus- 
tice/' as Mr. Hobhouse says, "at the outset the com- 
munity interferes mainly on what we may call 
supernatural grounds." From the beginning mis- 
deeds are punished, not merely as wrongs done to 
society, but as wrong done to the gods and as wrong- 
doing for which the community collectively is re- 
sponsible to the gods. Justice from the beginning is 
not individual resentment, but "public action taken 
for the public safety." It is not, as Mr. Hobhouse 
calls it, "revenge guided and limited by custom." 
It is the customary action of the community taken 
to avert divine vengeance. The action taken assumes 
in extreme cases the form of the death penalty ; but 
its usual form of action is that of taboo. 

If the origin of justice is to be sought in something 
that is not justice, if justice in particular and mo- 
rality in general are to be treated as having been 
evolved out of something which was in a way different 



230 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

from them and yet in a way must have contained 
them, inasmuch as they came forth from it, we shall 
do well to look for that something, not in the unhis- 
torical, unreal abstraction of an imaginary individual, 
apart from society, but in society itself when it is as 
yet not clearly conscious of the justice and morality 
at work within it. Such a stage in the development 
of society is, I think, to be discerned. 

We have seen that, "at almost, if not quite, the 
lowest stages " of human development, there is 
something which, according to Mr. Hobhouse, cor- 
responds "roughly to our own administration of 
justice" (I, 81). But this rough justice implies 
conscious, deliberate action on the part of the com- 
munity. It implies that the community as such 
makes some sort of enquiry into what can be the 
cause of the misfortunes which are befalling it; 
and that, having found out the person responsible, 
it deliberately takes the steps it deems necessary 
for putting itself right with the supernatural power 
that has sent the sickness or famine. Now, such 
conscious, purposive, deliberate action may and 
probably does take place at almost the lowest stage 
of development of society; but not, we may surmise, 
at quite the lowest. What eventually is done con- 



MORALITY 23I 

sciously and deliberately is probably done in the 
first place much more summarily and automatically. 
And — in quite the lowest stage of social develop- 
ment — it is by means of the action of taboo that 
summary and automatic punishment for breaches of 
the custom of the community is inflicted. Its action 
is automatic and immediate: merely to come in 
contact with the forbidden thing is to become ta- 
booed yourself ; and so great is the horror and dread 
of such contact, even if made unwittingly, that it is 
capable of causing, when discovered, death. Like 
the justice, however, of which it is the forerunner, 
it does not result always in death, nor does it produce 
that effect in most cases. But what it does do is 
to make the offender himself taboo and as infectious 
as the thing that rendered him taboo. Here, too, 
the action of taboo, in excommunicating the offender, 
anticipates, or rather foreshadows, the action of 
justice when it excludes the guilty person from the 
community and makes of him an outlaw. Again, in 
the rough justice found at almost, though not quite, 
the lowest stages, the earliest offences of which 
official notice, so to speak, is taken, are offences for 
which the punishment — disease or famine, etc. — 
falls on the community as a whole, because the com- 



232 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

munity, in the person of one of its members, has 
offended as a whole against heaven. In the earlier 
stage of feeling, also, which survives where taboo 
prevails, it is the community as a whole which may 
be infected, and which must suffer if the offender is 
allowed to spread the infection ; it is the community, 
as a whole, which is concerned to thrust out the 
guilty person — every one shuns him because he is 
taboo. Thus, in this the earliest stage, the offender 
against the custom of the community is outlawed 
just as effectively as in later stages of social develop- 
ment. But no formal sentence is pronounced; no 
meeting of the men or the elders of the community 
is held to try the offender; no reason is given or 
sought why the offence should thus be punished. The 
operation of taboo is like that of the laws of nature : 
the man who eats poisonous food dies with no reason 
given. A reason may eventually be found by science, 
and is eventually discovered, though the process of 
discovery is slow, and many mistakes are made, 
and many false reasons are given before the true 
reason is found. So, too, the true reason for the pro- 
hibition of many of the things, which the community 
feels to be forbidden and pronounced to be taboo, is 
found, with the progress of society — when it does 



MORALITY 233 

progress, which is not always — to be that they are 
immoral and irreligious, though here, too, many 
mistakes are made before true morality and true 
religion are found. But at the outset no reason is 
given: the things are simply offensive to the com- 
munity and are tabooed as such. We, looking back 
at that stage in the evolution of society, can see that 
amongst the things thus offensive and tabooed are 
some which, in later stages, are equally offensive, 
but are now forbidden for a reason that can be 
formulated and given, viz. that they are offences 
against the law of morality and the law of God. 
That reason, at the outset of society, may scarcely 
have been consciously present to the mind of man: 
progress, in part at least, has consisted in the discov- 
ery of the reasons of things. But that man did from 
the beginning avoid some of the things which are 
forbidden by morality and religion, and that those 
things were taboo to him, is beyond the possibility 
of doubt. Nor can it be doubted that in the prohi- 
bition and punishment of them there was inchoate 
justice and inchoate religion. Such prohibition 
was due to the collective action and expressed the 
collective feeling of the community as a whole. 
And it is from such social action and feeling that 



234 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

justice, I suggest, has been evolved — not from the 
feeling of resentment experienced by the individual 
as an individual. Personal resentment and personal 
revenge may have stimulated justice to action. 
But, by the hypothesis we have been examining, 
they were not justice. Neither have they been 
transformed into justice: they still exist as some- 
thing distinct from justice and capable of pervert- 
ing it. 

The form which justice takes in the period which 
is almost, but not quite, the lowest stage of human 
evolution is the sense of the collective responsibility 
of the community for all its actions, that is to say, 
for the acts of all its members. And that responsi- 
bility in its earliest shape is felt to be a responsibility 
to heaven, to the supernatural powers that send dis- 
ease and famine upon the community. In those 
days no man sins to himself alone, just as, in still 
earlier days, no man could break a taboo without 
becoming a source of danger to the whole community. 
The wrong-doer has offended against the super- 
natural powers and has brought down calamity 
upon the community. He is therefore punished, 
directly as an offender against the god of the com- 
munity, and indirectly for having involved the com- 



MORALITY 235 

munity in suffering. In Dr. Westermarck's words 
(I, 194), there is "genuine indignation against the 
offender, both because he rebels against God, and 
because he thereby exposes the whole community 
to supernatural dangers." But though society for 
many long centuries continues to punish rebellion 
against God, still in the long run it ceases, or tends 
to cease, doing so. Its reason for so ceasing is inter- 
preted differently by different schools of thought. 
On the one hand, it is said in derision, let the gods 
punish offences against the gods — the implication 
being that there are no such offences to punish, 
because there is no god. On the other hand, it is 
said, "I will repay, saith the Lord" — the implica- 
tion being that man may not assume to be the min- 
ister of divine vengeance. If, then, we bear in mind 
that the fact may be interpreted in either of these 
different ways, we shall not fall into the fallacy 
of imagining that the mere existence of the fact 
suffices to prove either interpretation to be true. 
Yet this fallacy plays its part in lending fictitious 
support to the doctrine that morality is in no wise 
dependent upon religion. The offences now pun- 
ished by law, it is argued, are no longer punished 
as offences against religion, but solely as offences 



236 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

against the good of the community. To this argu- 
ment the reply is that men believe the good of the 
community to be the will of God, and do not 
believe murder, theft, adultery, etc., to be merely 
offences against man's laws. Overlooking this 
fact, which is fatal to the doctrine that morality is 
in no wise dependent on religion, the argument we 
are discussing proceeds to maintain that the basis 
for the enforcement of morality by the law is recog- 
nised by every one who knows anything of the phi- 
losophy of law to be what is good for the community 
and its members: fraud and violence are punished 
as such, and not because they are offences against 
this or that religion. The fact that the law no 
longer punishes them as offences against God suffices 
to show that it is only as offences against humanity 
that there is any sense, or ever was any sense, in 
punishing them. Religion may have reenforced 
morality very usefully at one time, by making out 
that moral misdeeds were offences against God, 
but such arguments are not now required. The 
good and the well-being of humanity is in itself 
sufficient argument. Humanitarianism is taking 
the place of religion, and by so doing is demonstrat- 
ing that morality is, as it always has been, indepen- 



MORALITY 237 

dent of religion ; and that in truth religion has built 
upon it, not it upon religion. As Hoffding puts it 
(p. 328): " Religious faith . . . assumes an inde- 
pendent human ethic developed historically under 
the practical influence of the ethical feeling of man." 
That is to say, morality is in Hoffding's view inde- 
pendent of religion, and prior to religion, both as a 
matter of logic and of history. As a matter of his- 
tory — of the history of religion — this seems to 
me, for the reasons already given, to be contrary 
to the facts as they are known. The real reason 
for maintaining that morality is and must be — and 
must have been — independent of religion, seems 
to me to be a philosophical reason. I may give it 
in Hoffding's own words: "What other aims and 
qualities," he asks (p. 324), "could man attribute 
to his gods or conceive as divine, but those which he 
has learnt from his own experience to recognise 
as the highest?" The answer expected to the ques- 
tion plainly is not merely that it is from experience 
that man learns, but that man has no experience of 
God from which he could learn. The answer given 
by Mr. Hobhouse, in the concluding words of his 
Morals in Evolution is that "the collective wisdom" 
of man "is all that we directly know of the Divine." 



238 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Here, too, no direct access to God is allowed to be 
possible to man. It is from his experience of other 
men — ■ perhaps even of himself and his own doings 
— that man learns all he knows of God : but he has 
himself no experience of God. Obviously, then, from 
this humanitarian point of view, what a man goes 
through in his religious moments is not experience, 
and we are mistaken if we imagine that it was ex- 
perience ; it is only a misinterpretation of experience. 
It is on the supposition that we are mistaken, on the 
assumption that we make a misinterpretation, that 
the argument is built to prove that morality is and 
must be independent of religion. Argument to 
show, or proof to demonstrate, that we had not the 
experience, or, that we mistook something else for 
it, is, of course, not forthcoming. But if we hold 
fast to our conviction, we are told that we are fleeing 
"to the bosom of faith." 

Until some better argument is produced, we may 
be well content not merely to flee but to rest there. 



CHRISTIANITY 

The subject dealt with in this lecture will be 
the place of Christianity in the evolution of religion ; 
and I shall approach it by considering the place 
of religion in the evolution of humanity. It will 
be therefore advisable, indeed necessary, for me 
to consider what is meant by evolution; and I wish 
to begin by explaining the point of view from which 
I propose to approach the three ideas of evolution, 
of the evolution of humanity and the evolution of 
religion. 

The individual exists, and can only exist, in society. 
Society cannot exist without individuals as mem- 
bers thereof; and the individual cannot exist save 
in society. From this it follows that from one 
point of view the individual may be regarded as 
a means — a means by which society attains its 
end or purpose: every one of us has his place or 
function in society; and society thrives according 
as each member performs his function and dis- 
charges his duty. From another point of view 

2 39 



24O COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

the individual may be regarded as an end. If 
man is a social animal, if men live in society, it 
is because so alone can a man do what is best for 
himself: it is by means of society that he realises 
his end. It is then from this proposition, viz. that 
the individual is both a means and an end, that 
I wish to approach the idea of evolution. 

I will begin by calling attention to the fact that 
that proposition is true both statically, that is to 
say, is true of the individual's position in a com- 
munity, and is also true dynamically, that is to say, 
is true of his place in the process of evolution. On 
the former point, that the proposition is true stati- 
cally, of the position of the individual in the com- 
munity, I need say but little. In moral philosophy 
it is the utilitarian school which has particularly 
insisted upon this truth. That school has steadily 
argued that, in the distribution of happiness or of 
the good, every man is to count as one, and nobody 
to count as more than one — that is to say, in the 
community the individual is to be regarded as the 
end. The object to be aimed at is not happiness 
in general and no one's happiness in particular, 
but the happiness of each and every individual. 
It is the individual and his happiness which is the 



CHRISTIANITY 241 

end, for the sake of which society exists and to which 
it is the means; otherwise the individual might 
derive no benefit from society. But if the truth 
that the individual is an end as well as a means 
is recognised by moral philosophy, that truth has 
also played at least an equally important part in 
political philosophy. It is the very breath of the 
cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity, — a cry 
wrung out from the heart of man by the system of 
oppression which denied that the ordinary citizen 
had a right to be anything but a means for pro- 
curing enjoyment to the members of the ruling class. 
The truth that any one man — whatever his place 
in society, whatever the colour of his skin — has as 
much right as any other to be treated as an end 
and that no man was merely a means to the en- 
joyment or happiness or well-being of another, was 
the charter for the emancipation of slaves. It is 
still the magna charta for the freedom of every 
member of the human race. No man is or can be 
a chattel — a thing existing for no other purpose 
than to subserve the interests of its owner and to 
be a means to his ends. But though from the 
truth that the individual is in himself an end as well 
as a means, it follows that all men have the right to 



242 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

freedom, it does not follow as a logical inference 
that all men are equal as means — as means to the 
material happiness or to the moral improvement 
of society. 

I need not further dwell upon the fact that stati- 
cally as regards the relations of men to one another 
in society at any moment, the truth is fully recognised 
that the individual is not merely a means to the 
happiness or well-being of others, but is also in him- 
self an end. But when we consider the proposition 
dynamically, when we wish to find out the part it 
has played as one of the forces at work in evolu- 
tion, we find that its truth has been far from fully 
recognised — partly perhaps because utilitarianism 
dates from a time when evolution, or the bearing 
of it, was not understood. But the truth is at least 
of as great importance dynamically as it is statically. 
And on one side, its truth and the importance of 
its truth has been fully developed: that the indi- 
vidual is a means to an end beyond him; and that, 
dynamically, he has been and is a factor in evolu- 
tion, and as a factor merely a means and nothing 
else — all this has been worked out fully, if not 
to excess. The other side of the truth, the fact 
that the individual is always an end, has, however, 



CHRISTIANITY 243 

been as much neglected by the scientific evolutionist 
as it was by the slave-driver: he has been liable 
to regard men as chattels, as instruments by which 
the work of evolution is carried on. The work has 
got to be done (by men amongst other animals and 
things), things have to be evolved, evolution must go 
on. But, why? and for whom? with what purpose 
and for whose benefit? with what end? are ques- 
tions which science leaves to be answered by those 
people who are foolish enough to ask them. Science 
is concerned simply with the individual as a means, 
as one of the means, whereby evolution is carried 
on ; and doubtless science is justified — if only 
on the principle of the division of labour — in con- 
fining itself to the department of enquiry which 
it takes in hand and in refusing to travel beyond it. 
Any theory of man, therefore, or of the evolution 
of humanity, which professes to base itself strictly 
on scientific fact and to exclude other considera- 
tions as unscientific and therefore as unsafe material 
to build on, will naturally, and perhaps necessarily, 
be dominated by the notion that the individual 
exists as a factor in evolution, as one of the means 
by which, and not as in any sense the end for which, 
evolution is carried on. 



244 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

Such seems to be the case with the theory of 
humanitarianism. It bases itself upon science, 
upon experience, and rules out communion with 
God as not being a scientific fact or a fact of ex- 
perience at all. Based upon science, it is a theory 
which seeks amongst other things to assign to 
religion its place in the evolution of humanity. 
According to the theory, the day of religion is over, 
its part played out, its function in the evolution of 
humanity discharged. According to this theory, 
three stages may be discerned in the evolution of 
humanity when we regard man as a moral being, 
as an ethical consciousness. Those three stages 
may be characterised first as custom, next religion, 
and finally humanitarianism. 

By the theory, in the first stage — that of custom 

— the spirits to whom cult is paid are vindictive. 
In the second stage — that of religion — man, 
having attained to a higher morality, credits his 
gods with that higher morality. In the third stage 

— that of humanitarianism — he finds that the 
gods are but lay figures on which the robes of 
righteousness have been displayed that man alone 
can wear — when he is perfect. He is not yet 
perfect. If he were, the evolution of humanity 



CHRISTIANITY 245 

would be attained — whereas at present it is as 
yet in process. The end of evolution is not yet 
attained: it is to establish, in some future genera- 
tion, a perfect humanity. For that end we must 
work; to it we may know that, as a matter of scien- 
tific evolution, we are working. On it, we may be 
satisfied, man will not enter in our generation. 

Now this theory of the evolution of humanity, 
and of the place religion takes in that evolution, is 
in essential harmony with the scientific treatment of 
the evolution theory, inasmuch as it treats of the 
individual solely as an instrument to something 
other than himself, as a means of producing a state 
of humanity to which he will not belong. But if 
the assumption that the individual is always a means 
and never an end in himself be false, then a theory 
of the evolution of man (as an ethical consciousness) 
which is based on that wrong assumption will 
itself be wrong. If each individual is an end, as 
valuable and as important as any other individual ; 
if each counts for one and not less than any one 
other, — then his end and his good cannot lie in the 
perfection of some future generation. In that case, 
his end would be one that ex hypo the si he could 
never enjoy, a rest into which he could never enter; 



246 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

and consequently it would be an irrational end, and 
could not serve as a basis for a rationalist theory 
of ethics. Man's object (to be a rational object) 
must have reference to a society of which he may 
be a member. The realisation of his object, there- 
fore, cannot be referred to a stage of society yet to 
come, on earth, after he is dead, — a society of 
which he, whether dead or annihilated, could not 
be a member. If, then, the individual's object is 
to be a rational object, as the humanitarian or 
rationalist assumes, then that end must be one in 
which he can share; and therefore cannot be in 
this world. Nor can that end be attained by doing 
man's will — for man's will may be evil, and re- 
gress as well as progress is a fact in the evolution 
of humanity; its attainment, therefore, must be 
effected by doing God's will. 

The truth that the individual is an end as well as 
a means is, I suggest, valuable in considering the 
dynamics as well as the statics of society. At least, 
it saves one from the self-complacency of imagining 
that one's ancestors existed with no other end and 
for no higher purpose than to produce — me ; and if 
the golden days anticipated by the theory of humani- 
tarianism ever arrive, it is to be supposed that the 



CHRISTIANITY 247 

men of that time will find it just as intolerable and 
revolting as we do now, to believe that past genera- 
tions toiled and suffered for no other reason, for no 
other end, and to no other purpose than that their 
successors should enter into the fruits of their labour. 
In a word, the theory that in the evolution of man as 
an ethical consciousness, as a moral being, religion 
is to be superseded by humanitarianism, is only 
possible so long as we deny or ignore the fact that 
the individual is an end and not merely a means. 
We will therefore now go on to consider the evolu- 
tion of religion from the point of view that the in- 
dividual is in himself an end as well as a means. 
If, of the world religions, we take that which is the 
greatest, as measured by the number of its adherents, 
viz. Buddhism, we shall see that, tried by this test, 
it is at once found wanting. The object at which 
Buddhism proclaims that man should aim is not 
the development, the perfection, and the realisation 
of the individual to the fullest extent : it is, on the 
contrary, the utter and complete effacement of the 
individual, so that he is not merely absorbed, but 
absolutely wiped out, in nirvana. In the atman, 
with which it is the duty of man to seek to identify 
himself, the individuality of man does not survive: 



248 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

it simply ceases to be. Now this obliteration of 
his existence may seem to a man in a certain mood 
desirable; and that mood may be cultivated, as 
indeed Buddhism seeks to cultivate it, systematically. 
But here it is that the inner inconsistency, the self- 
contradictoriness of Buddhism, becomes patent. 
The individual, to do anything, must exist. If he 
is to desire nothing save to cease to exist, he must 
exist to do that. But the teaching of Buddhism 
is that this world and this life is illusion — and 
further, that the existence of the individual self 
is precisely the most mischievous illusion, that 
illusion above all others from which it is incumbent 
on us to free ourselves. We are here for no other 
end than to free ourselves from that illusion. Thus, 
then, by the teaching of Buddhism there is an end, 
it may be said, for the individual to aim at. Yes ! 
but by the same teaching there is no individual 
to aim at it — individual existence is the most 
pernicious of all illusions. And further, by the 
teaching, the final end and object of religion is. to 
get rid of an individual existence, which does not 
exist to be got rid of, and which it is an illusion to 
believe in. In fine, Buddhism denies that the 
individual is either an end or a means, for it denies 



CHRISTIANITY 249 

the existence of the individual, and contradicts 
itself in that denial. The individual is not an end 
— the happiness or immortality, the continued 
existence, of the individual is not to be aimed at. 
Neither is he a means, forjhis very existence is an 
illusion, and as such is an obstacle or impediment 
which has to be removed, in order that he who is 
not may cease to do what he has never begun to do, 
viz. to exist. 

In Buddhism we have a developed religion — 
a religion which has been developed by a system 
of philosophy, but scarcely, as religion, improved 
by it. If, now, we turn to other religions less highly 
developed, even if we turn to religions the develop- 
ment of which has been early arrested, which have 
never got beyond the stage of infantile development, 
we shall find that all proceed on the assumption 
that communion between man and God is possible 
and does occur. In all, the existence of the in- 
dividual as well as of the god is assumed, even 
thtfugh time and development may be required to 
realise, even inadequately, what is contained in the 
assumption. In all, and from the beginning, 
religion has been a social fact : the god has been the 
god of the community; and, as such, has repre- 



250 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

sented the interests of the community. Those 
interests have been regarded not merely as other, 
but as higher, than the interests of the individual, 
when the two have been at variance, for the simple 
reason (when the time came for a reason to be 
sought and given) that the interests of the com- 
munity were the will of the community's god. 
Hence at all times the man who has postponed his 
own interests to those under the sanction of the god 
and the community — the man who has respected 
and upheld the custom of the community — has 
been regarded as the higher type of man, as the better 
man from the religious as well as from the moral 
point of view; while the man who has sacrificed 
the higher interests to the lower, has been punished 
— whether by the automatic action of taboo, or 
the deliberate sentence of outlawry — as one who, 
by breaking custom, has offended against the god 
and so brought suffering on the community. 

Now, if the interests, whether of the individual 
or the community, are regarded as purely earthly, 
the divergence between them must be utter and 
irreconcileable ; and to expect the individual to 
forego his own interests must be eventually dis- 
covered to be, as it fundamentally is, unreasonable. 



CHRISTIANITY 251 

If, on the other hand, for the individual to forego 
them is (as, in a cool moment, we all recognise it 
to be) reasonable, then the interests under the sanc- 
tion of the god and the community — the higher 
interests — cannot be other than, they must be 
identical with, the real interests of the individual. 
It is only in and through society that the individual 
can attain his highest interests, and only by doing 
the will of the god that he can so attain them. 
Doubtless — despite of logic and feeling — in all 
communities all individuals in a greater or less 
degree have deliberately preferred the lower to the 
higher, and in so doing have been actuated neither 
by love of God nor by love of their fellow-man. 
But, in so doing, they have at all times, in the latest 
as well as the earliest stages of society, been felt to 
be breaching the very basis of social solidarity, the 
maintenance of which is the will of the God wor- 
shipped by society. 

From that point of view the individual is regarded 
as a means. But he is also in himself an end, in- 
trinsically as valuable as any other member of 
the community, and therefore an end which society 
exists to further and promote. It is impossible, 
therefore, that the end, viewed as that which society 



252 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

as well as the individual aims at, and which society 
must realise, as far as it can realise it, through the 
individual, should be one which can only be attained 
by some future state of society in which he does not 
exist. "The kingdom of Heaven is within you" 
and not something to which you cannot attain. 
God is not far from us at any time. That truth was 
implicit at all stages in the evolution of religion — 
consciously recognised, perhaps more, perhaps less, 
but whether more or less consciously recognised, it 
was there. That is the conviction implied in the 
fact that man everywhere seeks God. If he seeks 
Him in plants, in animals, in stocks or stones, that 
only shows that man has tried in many wrong 
directions — not that there is not a right direction. 
It is the general law of evolution: of a thousand 
seeds thrown out, perhaps one alone falls into good 
soil. But the failure of the 999 avails nothing 
against the fact that the one bears fruit abundantly. 
What sanctifies the failures is that they were attempts. 
We indeed may, if we are so selfish and blind, 
regard the attempts as made in order that we might 
succeed. Certainly we profit by the work of our 
ancestors, — or rather we may profit, if we will. 
But our savage ancestors were themselves ends, and 



CHRISTIANITY 253 

not merely means to our benefit. It is monstrous 
to imagine that our salvation is bought at the cost 
of their condemnation. No man can do more 
than turn to such light as there may be to guide 
him. "To him that hath, shall be given," it is 
true — but every man at every time had something ; 
never was there one to whom nothing was given. 
To us at this day, in this dispensation, much has 
been given. But ten talents as well as one may 
be wrapped up: one as well as ten may be put to 
profit. It is monstrous to say that one could not 
be, cannot have been, used properly. It was for 
not using the one talent he had that the unfaithful 
servant was condemned — not for not having ten 
to use. 

Throughout the history of religion, then, two facts 
have been implied, which, if implicit at the beginning, 
have been rendered explicit in the course of its 
history or evolution. / They are, first, the existence 
of the individual as a member of society, in com- 
munion or seeking communion with God; and, 
next, that while the individual is a means to social 
ends, society is also a means of which the individual 
is the end.^j Neither end — neither that of society 
nor that of the individual — can be forwarded at 



254 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

the cost of the other; the realisation of each is to 
be attained only by the realisation of the other. 
Two consequences then follow with regard to evo- 
lution: first, it depends on us; evolution may have 
helped to make us, but we are helping to make it. 
Next, the end of evolution is not wholly outside 
any one of us, but in part is realised in us, or may 
be, if we so will. That is to say, the true end may 
be realised by every one of us; for each of us, as 
being himself an end, is an object of care to God — 
and not merely those who are to live on earth at 
the final stage of evolution. If the end is outside 
us, it is in love of neighbour ; if beyond us, it is in 
God's love. It is just because the end is (or may 
be) both within us and without us that we are bound 
up with our fellow-man and God. It is precisely 
because we are individuals that we are not the be-all 
and the end-all — that the end is without us. And 
it is because we are members of a community, that 
the end is not wholly outside us. 

In his Problems of Philosophy (p. 163) Hoffding 
says : " The test of the perfection of a human society 
is: to what degree is every person so placed and 
treated that he is not only a mere means, but also 
always at the same time an end?" and he points 



CHRISTIANITY 255 

out that "this is Kant's famous dictum, with another 
motive than that given to it by him." But if it 
is reasonable to apply this test to society, regarded 
from the point of view of statics, it is also reasonable 
to apply it to society regarded dynamically. If it is 
the proper test for ascertaining what degree of per- 
fection society at any given moment has attained, 
it is also the proper test for ascertaining what ad- 
vance, if any, towards perfection has been made 
by society between any two periods of its growth, 
any two stages in its evolution. But the moment 
we admit the possibility of applying a test to the 
process of evolution and of discovering to what end 
the process is moving, we are abandoning science 
and the scientific theory of evolution. Science 
formally refuses to consider whether there be any 
end to which the process of evolution is working: 
"end" is a category which science declines to apply 
to its subject-matter. In the interests of knowledge 
it declines to be influenced by any consideration of 
what the end aimed at by evolution may be, or 
whether there be any end aimed at at all. It simply 
notes what does take place, what is, what has been, 
and to some extent what may be, the sequence of 
events — not their object or purpose. And the 



256 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

science of religion, being a science, restricts itself 
in the same way. As therefore science declines to 
use the category, "end," progress is an idea impos- 
sible for science — for progress is movement towards 
an end, the realisation of a purpose and object. 
And science declines to consider whether progress 
is so much as possible. But, so far as the subject- 
matter of the science of religion is concerned, it is 
positive (that is to say, it is mere fact of observa- 
tion) that in religion an end is aimed at, for man 
everywhere seeks God and communion with Him. 
What the science of religion declines to do is to 
pronounce or even to consider whether that end is 
possible or not, whether it is in any degree achieved 
or not, whether progress is made or not. 

But if we do not, as science does, merely constate 
the fact that in religion an end is aimed at, viz. that 
communion with God which issues in doing His will 
from love of Him and therefore of our fellow-man; 
if we recognise that end as the end that ought to 
be aimed at, — then our attitude towards the whole 
process of evolution is changed : it is now a process 
with an end — and that end the same for the indi- 
vidual and for society. But at the same time it is 
no longer a process determined by mechanical 



CHRISTIANITY 257 

causes worked by the iron hand of necessity — and 
therefore it is no longer evolution in the scientific 
sense; it is no longer evolution as understood by 
science. It is now a process in which there may 
or may not be progress made ; and in which, there- 
fore, it is necessary to have a test of progress — a 
test which is to be found in the fact that the indi- 
vidual is not merely a means, but an end. Whether 
progress is made depends in part on whether there 
is the will in man to move towards the end proposed ; 
and that will is not uniformly exercised, as is shown 
by the fact that deterioration as well as advance 
takes place — regress occurs as well as progress ; 
whole nations, and those not small ones, may be 
arrested in their religious development. If we look 
with the eye of the missionary over the globe, every- 
where we see arrested development, imperfect 
communion with God. It may be that in such cases 
of imperfect communion there is an unconscious 
or hardly conscious recognition that the form of 
religion there and then prevalent does not suffice 
to afford the communion desired. Or, worse still, 
and much more general, there is the belief that such 
communion as does exist is all that can exist — that 
advance and improvement are impossible. From 



258 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

this state it has been the work of the religious spirit 
to wake us, to reveal to us God's will, to make us 
understand that it is within us, and that it may, 
if we will, work within us. It is as such a revela- 
tion of the will of God and the love of God, and as 
the manifestation of the personality of God, that 
our Lord appeared on earth. 

That appearance as a historic fact must take its 
place in the order of historic events, and must stand 
in relation to what preceded and to what followed 
and is yet to follow. In relation to what preceded, 
Christianity claims "to be the fulfilment of all that 
is true in previous religion' ' (Illingworth, Person- 
ality: Human and Divine, p. 75). The making 
of that claim assumes that there was some truth in 
previous religion, that so far as previous forms were 
religious, they were true — a fact that must con- 
stantly be borne in mind by the missionary. The 
truth and the good inherent in all forms of religion 
is that, in all, man seeks after God. The finality 
of Christianity lies in the fact that it reveals the 
God for whom man seeks. What was true in other 
religions was the belief in the possibility of com- 
munion with God, and the belief that only as a 
member of a society could the individual man attain 



CHRISTIANITY 259 

to that communion. What is offered by Christianity 
is a means of grace whereby that communion may 
be attained and a society in which the individual 
may attain it. Christianity offers a means whereby 
the end aimed at by all religions may be realised. 
Its finality, therefore, does not consist in its chrono- 
logical relation to other religions. It is not final 
because, or in the sense that, it supervened in the 
order of time upon previous religions, or that it 
fulfilled only their truth. Other religions have, as 
a matter of chronology, followed it, and yet others 
may follow it hereafter. But their chronological 
order is irrelevant to the question : Which of them 
best realises the end at which religion, in all its 
forms, aims? And it is the answer to that question 
which must determine the finality of any form of 
religion. No one would consider the fact that 
Mahommedanism dates some centuries after Christ 
any proof of its superiority to Christianity. And 
the lapse of time, however much greater, would 
constitute no greater proof. 

That different forms of religion do realise the 
end of religion in different degrees is a point on 
which there is general agreement. Monotheism is 
pronounced higherthan polytheism, ethical religions 



260 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

higher than non-ethical. {; What differentiates Chris- 
tianity from other ethical religions and from other 
forms of monotheism, is that in them religion appears 
as ancillary to morality, and imposes penalties and 
rewards with a view to enforce or encourage moral- 
ity. In them, at their highest, the love of man is for 
his fellow-man, and usually for himself. \ Chris^ 
tianity alone makes love of God to be the true basis 
and the only end of society, both that whereby per- 
sonality exists and the end in which it seeks its 
realisation. Therein the Christian theory of society 
differs from all others. Not merely does it hold that 
man cannot make himself better without making 
society better, that development of personality 
cannot be effected without a corresponding develop- 
ment of society. But it holds that such moral 
development and improvement of the individual and 
of society can find no rational basis and has no 
rational end, save in the love of God. 

In another way the Christian theory of society 
differs from all others. Like all others it holds 
that the unifying bond of every society is found in 
worship. Unlike others it recognises that the indi- 
vidual is restricted by existing society, even where 
that society is based upon a common worship. The 



CHRISTIANITY 26 1 

adequate realisation of the potentialities of the indi- 
vidual postulates the realisation of a perfect society, 
just as a perfect society is possible only provided 
that the potentialities of the individual are realised 
to the full. Such perfection, to which both society 
and the individual are means, is neither attained 
nor possible on earth, even where communion with 
God is recognised to be both the true end of society 
and the individual, and the only means by which 
that end can be attained. Still less is such per- 
fection a possible end, if morality is set above religion, 
and the love of man be substituted for the love of 
God. In that case the life of the individual upon 
earth is pronounced to be the only life of which he 
is, or can be, conscious ; and the end to which he is 
a means is the good of humanity as a whole. Now 
human society, from the beginning of its evolution 
to its end, may be regarded as a whole, just as the 
society existing at any given moment of its evolution 
may be regarded as a whole. But if we are to 
consider human society from the former point of 
view and to see in it, so regarded, the end to which 
the individual is a means, then it is clear that, until 
perfection is attained in some remote and very 
improbable future, the individual members of the 



262 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

human race will have laboured and not earned their 
reward, will have worked for an end which they 
have not attained, and for an end which when, if 
ever, it is attained, society as a whole will not enjoy. 
Such an end is an irrational and impossible object 
of pursuit. Perfection, if it is to be attained by the 
individual or by society, is not to be attained on 
earth, nor in man's communion with man. Religion 
from its outset has been the quest of man for God. 
It has been the quest of man, whether regarded as 
an individual or as a member of society. But if 
that quest is to be realised, it is not to be realised 
either by society or the individual, regarded as having 
a mere earthly existence. A new conception of the 
real nature of both is requisite. Not only must the 
individual be regarded as continuing to exist after 
death, but the society of which he is truly a member 
must be regarded as one which, if it manifests or 
begins to manifest itself on this earth, requires for 
its realisation — that is, for perfect communion 
with God — the postulate that though it manifests 
itself in this world, it is realised in the next. This 
new conception of the real nature of society and the 
individual, involving belief in the communion of 
the saints, and in the kingdom of Heaven as that 



CHRISTIANITY 263 

which may be in each individual, and therefore must 
extend beyond each and include all whether in this 
world or the next -p this conception is one which 
Christianity alone, of all religions, offers to the 
world. 

Religion is the quest of man for God. Man 
everywhere has been in search of God, peradventure 
he might find Him; and the history of religion is 
the history of his search. But the moment we regard 
the history — the evolution — of religion as a search, 
we abandon the mechanical idea of evolution: the 
cause at work is not material or mechanical, but 
final. The cause is no longer a necessary cause 
which can only have one result and which, when 
it operates, must produce that result. Progress is 
no longer something which must take place, which 
is the inevitable result of antecedent causes. It 
is something which may or may not take place and 
which cannot take place unless effort is made. In 
a word, it is dependent in part upon man's will — 
without the action of which neither search can be 
made nor progress in the search. But though in 
part dependent upon man's will, progress can only 
be made so far as man's will is to do God's will. 
And that is not always, and has not been always, 



1 



264 COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

man's will. Hence evolution has not always been 
progress. Nor is it so now. There have been 
lapses in civilisation, dark ages, periods when man's 
love for man has waned pari passu with the waning 
of his love for God. Such lapses there may be yet 
again. The fall of man may be greater, in the spirit- 
ual sense, than it ever yet has been, for man's will 
is free. But God's love is great, and our faith is in 
it. If Christianity should cease to grow where it 
now grows, and cease to spread where it as yet is 
not, there would be the greater fall. And on us 
would rest some, at least, of the responsibility. Chris- 
tianity cannot be stationary: if it stands, let it 
beware ; it is in danger of falling. Between religions, 
as well as other organisations, there is a struggle 
for existence. In that struggle we have to fight 
— for a religion to decline to fight is for that religion 
to die. The missionary is not engaged in a work 
of supererogation, something with which we at home 
have no concern. We speak of him as in the fore- 
front of the battle. We do not usually or constantly 
realise that it is our battle he is fighting — that his 
defeat, if he were defeated, would be the beginning 
of the end for us; that on his success our fate de- 
pends. The metaphor of the missionary as an out- 



CHRISTIANITY 265 

post sounds rather picturesque when heard in a ser- 
mon, — or did so sound the first time it was used, I 
suppose, — but it is not a mere picture; it is the 
barest truth. The extent to which we push our out- 
posts forward is the measure of our vitality, of how 
much we have in us to do for the world. Six out of 
seven of Christendom's missionaries come from the 
United States of America. Until I heard that from 
the pulpit of Durham Cathedral, I had rather a 
horror of big things and a certain apprehension 
about going to a land where bigness, rather than the 
golden mean, seemed to be taken as the standard of 
merit. But from that sermon I learnt something, 
viz. not only that there are big things to be done in 
the world, but that America does them, and that 
America does more of them than she talks about. 



APPENDIX 

Since the chapter on Magic was written, the 
publication of Wilhelm Wundt's Volker psychologies 
Vol. II, Part II, has led me to believe that I ought to 
have laid more stress on the power of the magician, 
which I mention on pages 74, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, and 
less on the savage's recognition of the principle that v 
like produces like. In the stage of human evolution 
known as Animism, every event which calls for ex- 
planation is explained as the doing of some person 
or conscious agent. When a savage falls ill, his 
sickness is regarded as the work of some ill-disposed 
person, whose power cannot be doubted — for it is 
manifest in the sickness it has caused — and whose 
power is as mysterious as it is indubitable. That 
power is what a savage means by magic; and the 
persons believed to possess it are magicians. It 
is the business of the sick savage's friends to find 
out who is causing his sickness. Their suspicion 
may fall on any one whose appearance or behaviour 
is suspicious or mysterious; and the person sus- 

267 



268 APPENDIX 

pected comes to be regarded as a witch or magician, 
from the very fact that he is suspected. Such per- 
sons have the power of witchcraft or magic, because 
they are believed to have the power: possunt quia 
posse videntur. Not only are they believed to possess 
the power; they come to believe, themselves, that 
they possess it. They believe that, possessing it, 
they have but to exercise it. The Australian ma- 
gician has but to " point" his stick, and, in the belief 
both of himself and of every one concerned, the 
victim will fall. All over the world the witch has 
but to stab the image she has drawn or made, and 
the person portrayed will feel the wound. In this 
proceeding, the image is like the person, and the 
blow delivered is like the blow which the victim is to 
feel. It is open to us, therefore, to say that, in this 
typical case of " imitative" or " mimetic" magic, 
like is believed to produce like. And on pages 75-77, 
and elsewhere, above, I have taken that position. 
But I would now add two qualifications. The first is, 
as already intimated, that, though stabbing an 
effigy is like stabbing the victim, it is only a magician 
or witch that has the power thus to inflict wounds, 
sickness, or death: the services of the magician or 
witch are employed for no other reason than that 



APPENDIX 269 

the ordinary person has not the power, even by the 
aid of the rite, to cause the effect. The second 
qualification is that, whereas we distinguish between 
the categories of likeness and identity, the savage 
makes but little distinction. To us it is evident 
that stabbing the image is only like stabbing the 
victim; but to the believer in magic, stabbing the 
image is the same thing as stabbing the victim; 
and in his belief, as the waxen image melts, so the 
victim withers away. 

It would, therefore, be more precise and more 
correct to say (page 74, above) that eating tiger to 
make you bold points rather to a confusion, in the 
savage's mind, of the categories of likeness and 
identity, than to a conscious recognition of the 
principle that like produces like: as you eat tiger's 
flesh, so you become bold with the tiger's boldness. 
The spirit of the tiger enters you. But no magic is 
necessary to enable you to make the meal : any one 
can eat tiger. The belief that so the tiger's spirit 
will enter you is a piece of Animism; but it is not 
therefore a piece of magic. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abt, A. Die Apologie des Apuleius von Madaura und die 
an tike Zauberei. Giessen. 1908. 

Alviella, G. Origin and Growth of the Conception of 
God. London. 1892. 

Bastian, A. Allerlei aus Volks- und Menschenkunde. 
Berlin. 1888. 

Bousset, W. What is Religion? (E. T.). London. 1907. 

Davies, T. W. Magic, Divination, and Demonology. Leip- 
zig. 1898. 

Ellis, A. B. The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave 
Coast. London. 1890. The Tshi-speaking Peoples of 
the Gold Coast. London. 1887. The Yoruba-speak- 
ing Peoples of the Slave Coast. London. 1894. 

Fahz, L. De poetarum Romanorum doctrina magica. 
Giessen. 1904. 

Farnell, L. R. The Place of the Sonder-Gotter in Greek 
Polytheism, in Anthropological Essays. Oxford. 1907. 

Frazer, J. G. Adonis, Attis, Osiris. London. 1905. The 
Golden Bough. London. 1900. Lectures on the Early 
History of the Kingship. London. 1905. 

Granger, F. The Worship of the Romans. London. 

Haddon, *L C. Magic and Fetishism. London. 1906. 

Harrison, J. E. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Re- 
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Hartland, E. S. The Legend of Perseus. London. 1895. 

Hobhouse, L. T. Morals in Evolution. London. 1906. 

Hoffding, H. Philosophy of Religion (E. T.). London. 
1906. 

271 



272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hollis. The Masai. Oxford. 1905. 

Howitt, A. W. The Native Tribes of South East Australia. 
London. 1904. 

Hubert, H. Magia. In Daremberg Saglio's Dictionnaire 
des Antiquites. Paris. 1904. 

Hubert, H. & Mauss, M. Theorie generate de la magie. 
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1899. 

Huvelin, P. Magie et droit individuel. L'Annde Socio- 
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Illingworth, J. R. Personality: Human and Divine. Lon- 
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Jevons, F. B. The Definition of Magic. Sociological Re- 
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Lang, A. Custom and Myth. London. 1893. Magic and 
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Lenormant, F. Chaldean Magic (E. T.). London. 1877. 

Maccullough, J. A. Comparative Theology. London. 
1902. 

Marett, R. R. Is Taboo a Negative Magic? In Anthropo- 
logical Essays. Oxford. 1907. 

Mauss, M. Des Societes Eskimos. L'Annee Sociologique. 
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Muller, J. G. Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen. 
Basel. 1855. 

Nassau, R. H. Fetichism in West Africa. London. 1904. 



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Parker, K. L. The Euahlayi Tribe. London. 1905. 

Payne, E. J. History of the New World called America. 
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Reinach, S. Cultes, Mythes, et Religions. Paris. 1905. 
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Rhys Davids, T. W. Origin and Growth of Religion. Lon- 
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Ruhl, L. De Mortuorum indicio. Giessen. 1903. 

Schmidt, H. Veteres Philosophi quomodo indicaverint de 
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Schrader, O. Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumer. 
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Skeat, W. W. Malay Magic. London. 1900. 

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Spencer & Gillen. The Native Tribes of Central Aus- 
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Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture. London. 1873. 

Waitz, T. Anthropologic der Naturvolker. Leipzig. 1864. 

Webster, H. Primitive Secret Societies. London. 1908. 

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Moral Ideas. London. 1906. 

Wundt, W. Volkerpsychologie. Leipzig. 1 904-1 907. 



INDEX 



Acosta, Father, 193. 
Agnostic, 4, 6. 
Agries, 143- 
Alfoors, 194. 
Algonquins, 143. 
All-father, 190. 
Ancestors, 162. 

Ancestor worship, 52, 53; may 
be arrested by religion, 53, 54, 

55- 

Andaman Islands, 169. 

Animal sacrifice, 209; animal 
meal, 178. 

Animals, worshipped, in. 

Animism, 204, 215, 216, 217; and 
magic, 89, 90, 98; and fe- 
tichism, 116, 117, 118; poly- 
theism, 131; not religion, 136. 

Anticipation, of nature, 73. 

Antinomy, the, of religious feel- 
ing, 174. 

Anzam, 170. 

Applied science of religion, 2 ff. ; 
looks to the future, 3; is used 
by the missionary as a prac- 
tical man, 15, 16; its object, 
18, 21. 

Ashantee Land, 153, 155. 

Atheist, 4, 6. 

Atman, 247. 

At-one-ment, 178. 

Attention, 9, 10. 

Australia, 183 ff. 

Australian tribes, religion of, 27, 
28. 

Aztecs, 188, 190. 

Basutos, 181. 
Becoming, 214. 



Being, is in process of evolution, 
214; still incomplete, 214. 

Belief, and desire, 39, 40; in im- 
mortality and God, 31, 32; 
erroneous, and magic, 79; in 
magic, 85; religious, 137. 

Bhogaldai, 194. 

Billiards, 78. 

Blood, and rain, 161. 

Bones, of animals, hung up, 78. 

Boorah, 162 ff. 

Bosman, 109 ff., 112, 113. 

Bread, prayer for daily, 181. 

Buddhism, 247 ff.; and immor- 
tality, 36, 37, 61, 62, 63; its 
fundamental illogicality, 66; its 
strength, 66. 

Buro, 194. 

Buzzard, 76. 

Byamee, 162 ff., 191, 198. 

Cause, and conditions, 77, 85. 

Celebes, 194. 

Ceram, 181. 

Ceremonies, for rain, 161. 

Chain of existence, 65. 

Charms, and prayers, 150, 115, 152. 

Chattels, 241, 243. 

Cherokee Indian, 50, 76, 77. 

Chicomecoatl, 193. 

Childhood, 98. 

China, 194, 197. 

Christianity, 239 ff., 258, 259, 260; 
the highest form of religion, 15, 
18, 22, 23; and other forms of 
religion, 26, 27, 28, 35; alone 
teaches self-sacrifice as the way 
to life eternal, 69 ; and sacrifice, 
209. 



275 



276 



INDEX 



Clouds, 153; of smoke and rain, 
161, 162. 

Communal purposes, and magic, 
91. 

Communion, 175; not so much 

# an intellectual belief as an ob- 
ject of desire, 43, 44; of man 
with God the basis of morality, 
62 ; logically incompatible with 
Buddhism, 63; involves per- 
sonal existence, 67; with God, 
137; sought in prayer, 172; 
and sacrifice, 172; in Mexico, 
193; maintained by sacra- 
mental eating, 195; annually, 
196; renewed, 198; the true 
end of sacrifice, 207, 208; be- 
tween man and God, 249; im- 
perfect, 257. 

Community, 254; and magic, 81, 
97; and its God, 91. 

Community, the, and fetiches, 
122; and its gods, 135; and 
prayer, 146, 147, 148, 166; 
and the individual, 218, 239. 

Comparative method, 20, 21. 

Comparative Philology, 20. 

Comparison, method of, 17; im- 
plies similarity in the religions 
compared, 19; and implies dif- 
ference also, 20; contrasted 
with comparative method, 21; 
deals with differences, 22. 

Comte, 213. 

Conciliation, and coercion, of 
spirits, 121. 

Congregations, 170. 

Contagious magic, 85. 

Continuation theory, 55, 56. 

Corn, eaten sacramentally, 194, 

195. 
Corn-maiden, 195. 
Corn-mother, 195. 
Corn-spirit, 196, 199, 200. 
Cotton-mother, 194. 
Creator, 170. 



Creek Indians, 194. 
Custom, 244; protected by the 
god of the community, 219. 

Dances, 162; and prayer, 153. 

Dead, the, ^S; return, 47; spirits 
of the, 92. 

Death, a mistake according to the 
primitive view, 44, 45; or else 
due to magic, 45, 46, 80. 

Deer, 74. 

Degradation of religion, 24. 

Deification, 53. 

Deiphobus, 54. 

Delaware prayer, 145. 

Departmental deities, 190. 

Desacralisation, 186. 

Desire for immortality, is the 
origin of the belief in immor- 
tality, 40, 41 ; is not a selfish 
desire, 42 ; the root of all evils, 
66; religious, 115, 116, 121; 
and prayer, 142, 149; and the 
worship of the gods, 135; and 
religion, 158, 166; of the com- 
munity, 163. 

Desire of all nations, 115, 173. 

Dieri, 50, 161, 164. 

Difference, implies similarity, 27. 

Differences, to be taken into ac- 
count by method of comparison, 
22; their value, 23, 24; postu- 
lated by science, 24. 

Differentiation of the homogene- 
ous, 23, 24, 25. 

Domesticated plants and animals, 
190. 

Dreams, and the soul, 37; their 
emotional value, 42. 

Drought, 164. 

Dugongs, 164, 165. 

Dynamics, of society, 246, 255. 

East Indies, 181. 
Eating of the god, 193. 
Eating tiger, 74, 89. 



INDEX 



277 



Ellis, Colonel, 113, 120, 121, 122. 

Emotional element, in fetichism 
and religion, 136. 

End, the, gives value to what we 
do, 13; and is a matter of will, 
13; of society, 251, 253; a 
category unknown to science, 

255- 

Ends, anti-social, 81. 

Error, 25. 

Euahlayi, 48, 162, 191, 198. 

Evolution, 214; of religion, 6, 
239, 247, 253; and progress, 
9, 12, 24, 264; theory of, 23; 
and the history of religion, 172, 
173; of humanity, 239, 244, 
246; law of, 252; end of, 254, 
256. 

Faith, 137, 238; the conviction 
that we can attain our ends, 14; 
shared by the religious man 
with all practical men, 14, 15; 
exhibited in adopting method 
of comparison in religion, 17; 
in Christianity, 18; banishes 
fear of comparisons, 18, 19; 
in the communion of man with 
God manifests itself in the 
desire for immortality, 68. 

Family, and society, 98. 

Famine, 205. 

Father, 98. 

Feeling, religious, 137; moral and 
religious, 81. 

Fetich, defined, in, 112; offer- 
ings made to it, 112; not merely 
an "inanimate," 113, 116; but 
a spirit, 116, 117; possesses 
personality and will, 117; aids 
in the accomplishment of desire, 
117, 119; may be made, 120; 
is feared, 120; has no religious 
value, 120, 121; distinct from 
a god, 122; subservient to its 
owner, 122; has no plurality of 



worshippers, 122; its principal 
object to work evil, 123; serves 
its owner only, 127; perma- 
nence of its worship, 129; has 
no specialised function, 129, 
130; is prayed to and talked 
with, 132; worshipped by an 
individual, 1 34 ; and not by the 
community, 135, 170. 

Tetichism, 105 ff., 215; as the 
lowest form of religion, 106, 
107; as the source of religious 
values, 107, 108; and magic, 
90; and religion, 114, 120, 136; 
the law of its evolution, 119, 
120; condemned by public 
opinion, 122, 123; offensive to 
the morality of the native, 126; 
and at variance with his re- 
ligion, 126, 127; not the basis 
of religion, 127; and polythe- 
ism, 128, 131, 132, 133,- and 
fear, 136. 

Finality of Christianity, 258, 259. 

First-fruit ceremonials, 183, 184; 
and the gods, 185, 187; an act 
of worship, 187, 188. 

First-fruits, 181. 

Flesh of the divine being, 196. 

Fly-totem, 165, 166. 

Folk-lore, 85. 

Food supply, 205. 

Footprints, 74. 

Forms of religion, 19. 

Framin women, 152, 153, 155, 156. 

Frazer, J. G., 50, 76, 78, 79, 83, 
92, 94, 102, 153, 157, 158, 160, 
180, 192, 194-200, 202, 205. 

Fuegians, 169. 

Funerals, and prayer, 163. 

Future, knowledge of the, 14, 15. 

Future life, its relation to morality 
and religion, 36, 37, 57. 

Future punishments, and rewards, 
51, 61. 

Future world, 52 ff. 



278 



INDEX 



Ghosts, 38, 42. 

Gift-theory of sacrifice, 206. 

God, worshipped by community, 
91, 98; a supreme being, 168; 
etymology of the word, 133, 
134; a personal power, 136, 
137; correlative to a com- 
munity, 137. 

Gods and worshippers, 53; and 
fetichism, no; made and 
broken, no; personal, 121; 
* * departmental, " 129; their 
personality, 130, 131; and the 
good of the community, 123; 
and fetiches, 124; are the 
powers that care for the welfare 
of the community, 126, 172; 
and spirits, 128; "of a mo- 
ment," 128, 136; their proper 
names, 131; worshipped by a 
community, 134; and the de- 
sires of their worshippers, 134; 
not evolved from fetiches, 135; 
promote the community's good, 
135, 137, 167; and prayer, 140, 
147, 148; and morality, 169; 
of a community identified with 
the community, 177; as ethical 
powers, 215; punish trans- 
gression, 220. 

Gold Coast, prayer, 143. 

Golden Age, 25. 

Good, the, 140; and the gods, 

137. 
Gotama, 64. 
Gott, and giessen, 134. 
Grace, 259. 
Gratitude, 181. 
Great Spirit, the, 143. 
Guardian spirits, in. 
Guinea, 197. 

Haddon, Dr., 83, 91, 100, 101, 
106, 107, 117, 118, 124, 129, 
130, 132, 133. 

Hades, 58. 



Hallucinations, 38. 

Happiness, 240. 

Hartford Theological Seminary, 
1, 22, 106. 

Harvest, prayers and sacrifice, 
180 ff. 

Harvest communion, 188, 189. 

Harvest customs, 192, 198, 203. 

Harvest supper, 195 ff., 200; its 
sacramental character, 197. 

Health, and disease, 138. 

Heaven, kingdom of, 252, 262. 

Hebrew prophets, 207, 209. 

Hebrews, 54. 

Hegel, 213. 

Hindoo Koosh, 194. 

Historic science, has the historic 
order for its object, 11; but 
does not therefore deny that its 
facts may have value other than 
truth value, 11. 

History, of art and literature, 8; 
of religion, 253, 263. 

Ho dirge, 47. 

Hobhouse, L. T., 211, 214-216, 
222, 223, 226-229, 230, 237. 

Hoffding, H., 44, 166, 173, 254; 
on fetichism, 106, 114, 115, 121, 
124, 128-130, 133-137; on anti- 
nomy of religious feeling, 174; 
and morality, 211,21 4-2 1 6, 2 1 9, 
220, 237. 

Hollis, Mr., 143 ff. 

Homer, 16, 17. 

Homoeopathic magic, 80, 85, 93. 

Homogeneous, the, 23, 24. 

Howitt, Mr., 190. 

Hu, huta> 134- 

Humanitarianism, 214, 215, 236, 
244, 246, 247; and morality, 
221. 

Humanity, 213; its evolution, 244. 

Husband, 98. 

Ideals, a matter of the will, 13. 
Idols, 193. 



INDEX 



279 



Illingworth, J. R., 258. 

Illusion, 64, 248. 

Images, of dough, 193, 196. 

Imitative magic, 157. 

Immortality, 34 ff. 

Incorporation, 178. 

Individual, and the community, 
218, 239; cannot exist save in 
society, 225; both a means and 
an end for society, 240 ff., 246, 
247; existence of, 248; inter- 
ests of, 250, 251 ; end of, 253. 

Individuality, not destroyed but 
strengthened by uprooting self- 
ish desires, 67. 

Indo-China, 181, 194. 

Indo-European languages, 20. 

Infancy, helpless, 98. 

Initiation ceremonies, 190, 191; 
admit to the worship of the 
gods, 192 ; important for theory 
of sacrifice, 192. 

Interests, of the community, 250; 
and the individual, 250. 

Intoning, of prayer, 147. 

Israel, 59. 

Jaundice, 89. 
Jews, 53, 54. 
Judgments, of value, 115. 
Justice, public, 223, 224 ff. 

Kaitish rites, 164, 165. 

Kangaroo totem, 197. 

Kant, 255. 

Karma, 64, 65. 

Kei Islands, 156. 

Kern Baby, 195. 

Khonds of Orissa, and prayer, 

139, 167, 171. 
Killing of the god, 197. 
Kingsley, Miss, 48, 49, 116. 

Lake Nyassa, 146. 

Lake Superior, 143. 

Lang, Andrew, 129, 168, 169, 170. 



VAnnee Sociologique, 60. 

Like produces like, 72, 73, 74, 76, 

79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 89, 98, 100, 

160, 189. 
Litanies, 163. 
Love of neighbours, 254. 

MacCullough, J. A., 47. 

McTaggart, Dr., 49, 50. 

Magic, 32, 70 ff. ; and murder, 45, 
47; a colourable imitation of 
science, 71 ; a spurious sys- 
tem, 71, 72; fraudulent, 75, 76; 
origin of belief in, 79; regarded 
with disapproval, 79; sympa- 
thetic or homoeopathic, 80; 
offensive to the god of the 
community, 81 ; not prior to 
religion, 97; condemned when 
inconsistent with the public 
good, 97; and anti-social pur- 
poses, 98; decline of, 100; and 
the impossible, 101 ; private 
and public, 83; nefarious, 83; 
beneficent, 87, 88; does not 
imply spirits, 89; and religion, 
92 ff.; fundamentally different, 
95, 158, 160; mimics science 
and religion, 103; and the 
degradation of religion, 150, 
151, 152; and prayer, 153, 154; 
priority of, to religion, 154, 157; 
and sacramental eating, 199- 
204. See Appendix. 

Magician, his personality, 87. 

Mahomrnedanism, 259. 

Maize-mother, 190, 193, 194, 195, 
196. 

Maker, the, 168. 

Manganja, 146, 160. 

Mara tribe, 164. 

Marett, R. R., 151. 

Marriage law, 222, 227. 

Masai, and prayer, 143, 144, 145, 

Master of Life, 143. 



28o 



INDEX 



Mauss, M., 60. 

Maya, 64. 

Medical advice, 76. 

Mexico, 193, 194, i99) 20 °* 

Mimetic magic, 85. 

Minahassa, 194. 

Mind of Humanity, 213. 

Missionary, 6, 140, 210, 211, 257, 
265; interested in the value 
rather than the chronological 
order of religions, 12; being 
practical, uses applied science, 
15 ; and method of comparison, 
1 7 ; and notes resemblances, 22 ; 
requires scientific knowledge of 
the material he has to work on, 
34; may use as a lever the 
belief in man's communion with 
spirits, 69; and magic, 102, 103, 
104; and fetichism, 105; and 
heathen prayer, 138, 173. 

Momentary gods, 128, 136. 

Morality, 81, 83, 84, 95, 211 £f.,' 
260, 261 ; and communion with 
God, 62; and the mysteries, 
191; and prayer, 148. 

Moral transgression, and sin, 221. 

Mosquito -totem, 166. 

Mura-muras, 162. 

Mysteries, the Greek, 58, 62; and 
prayer, 180. 

Names, and gods, 121. 

Names, of gods, 121, 131, 132; of 

men, 132; and personality, 133. 
Nassau, Dr., 116, 168, 170. 
Natchez Indians, 194. 
Natural law, 72. 
Nature, uniformity of, 14, 15. 
Nefarious magic, 83-87, 95. 
Neilgherry Hills, 194. 
New Caledonia, 92, 153, 154, 155, 

156, 162. 
New Hebrides, 181. 
New South Wales, 162. 
Nias, 181. 



Niger, 181. 

Nirvana, 247. 

North American Indians, 111. 

Nyankupon, 169. 

Offerings, 178; and their object, 
180; made to fetiches, 112, 122. 

Old Testament, 54. 

Ol-kora, 154, 162. 

Onitsha, 181. 

Order of value, 7; distinct from 
chronological order, 7, 9, 15, 
16; historic, 8. 

Origin, and validity, 38, 39. 

Osages, 143. 

Parker, Mrs. L., 162 ff., 191. 

Perception, 9. 

Personality, of magician, 87; of 

gods and fetiches, 130, 131, 132; 

of God, 258 ; and proper names, 

*33- 
Personification, 136. 
Peru, 193, 194, 198. 
Pestilence, 205. 
Pinkerton, 109. 
Plato, 206, 207, 209. 
Political economy, 5, 6. 
Political philosophy, 241. 
Polytheism and fetichism, 128, 

130, I3 1 * *3 2 » *33- 

Pondos, 194. 

Power, personal, 87, 88, 100. 

Prayer, 92, 93, 94, 1381!.; among 
the heathen, 138; to fetiches, 
127; and desire, 142; and 
personal advantage, 144; and 
the community, 146; of indi- 
viduals, 147; unethical, 148, 
149; and magic, 154; and 
spells, 155, 157, 160; and 
famine, 158; for rain, 160; the 
expression of the heart's desire, 
160; never unknown to man, 
160, 161; in exceptional dis- 
tress, 182; of thanksgiving, 



INDEX 



28l 



182; occasional and recurring, 
179 ff. ; and communion, 180; 
its purpose, 175; and external 
rites, 176; implies sacrifice, 
176; not always reported by 
observers, 177; and sacrifice 
go together, 169; no worship 
without, 170; of Socrates, 171; 
and sacrifice, 172; Our Lord's, 
172, 173; practical, 167; the 
root of religion, 167, 168; and 
its objects, 163; a mother's 
prayer, 163; "singing," 164; 
and charms, 150, 165; at seed 
time, 205. 

Prayer-mill, 150. 

Priests, 91, 193; and gods, 121; 
and fetiches, 122. 

Primitive man, believes in immor- 
tality, 37. 

Private property, 5, 6. 

Progress, 9, 246, 256, 257, 263; 
and evolution, 24. 

Protective colouring, 70, 103. 

Psalmist, 54. 

Puluga, 169. 

Pure science of religion, is a his- 
toric science, 2; its facts may 
be used for different and con- 
tradictory purposes, 4. 

Rain, prayed for, 146, 160, 161. 

Rain-clouds, 154, 156, 161, 162. 

Rain-god, 91, 92. 

Rain-making, 84, 87, 88, 91, 161, 
164. 

Rebirth, 48, 49, 50. 

Regress, 246, 257. 

Reincarnation, 59; in animal 
form, 50, 51, 52; in new-born 
children, 48-50; in namesakes, 
50; its relation to morality and 
religion, 61. 

Religion, is a fact, 5; never un- 
known to man, 160, 161 ; essen- 
tially practical, 160, 175; its 



evolution, 239; as a survival of 
barbarism, 24; lowest forms to 
be studied first, 26, 27; is a 
yearning after and search for 
God, 28, 115, 136; a bond of 
community from the first, 43, 
59, 176; implies gods and their 
worship, 121, 122, 177, 217; 

... implies rites and prayers, 176; 
"under the guise of desire," 44, 
115, 149, 158, 166, 173; but it 
is the desire of the community, 
44; and morality, 37, 81, 83, 
84,211,215; and animism, 136; 
and fetichism, 106-109, I3t 5i 
131, 132, 136; and magic, 70, 
71, 72, 92-95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 
150, 151, 152, 154; mechanical, 
150; applied science of, 105; 
and its value, 109. 

Religious values, 9, 16. 

Resemblances, not more impor- 
tant than differences, for the 
method of comparison, 22 ; their 
value, 23, 24. 

Resentment and justice, 224. 

Responsibility, collective, 227, 
228, 234. 

Revelation, 172, 255; and evolu- 
tion, 173. 

Revenge and justice, 229. 

Rheumatism, 76. 

Rhys Davids, 64. 

Saa, 180. 

Sacrament, in Central Australia, 
197, 200. 

Sacramental meals, 183 ff., 197, 
199, 200, 201, 203. 

Sacrifice, 92, 93, 94, 175 ff.; to 
fetiches, 113; and worship, 137, 
177; and prayer, 172, 177; and 
the gift theory, 206; and com- 
munion, 207, 208; its ultimate 
form, 209, 210; and the ety- 
mology of "god," 133 ff., 137. 



282 



INDEX 



Saffron, 89. 

Science, has truth, not assignment 
of value, for its object, 10, 11, 
108; and history, 108; does 
not deal with ends, 255; and 
evolution, 257; and magic, 70, 
71, 72, 101 ; of the savage, 159, 
189. 

Science of religion, 256; pure and 
applied, 2 ff.; supposed to be 
incompatible with religious be- 
lief, 4; really has nothing to do 
with the truth or value of re- 
ligion, 5, 10; and prayer, 
140, 141 ; and the missionary, 
105. 

Sea Dyaks, 228. 

Search for God, the, 28, 29, 30, 34, 
35, 252, 258, 262. 

Seed time, 188, 205. 

Self-realising spirit, 213, 214. 

Seminole Indians, 194. 

Shakespeare, 16, 17. 

Sheol, 54, 5 8 - 

Similarity, between higher and 
lower forms of religion, 27 ; the 
basis for the missionary's work, 
28. 

"Singing," 164, 165. 

Slavery, 241, 243. 

"Smelling out," 84. 

Social purpose, and magic, 91. 

Society, a means, 253; as an end, 
261 ; perfection of, 254, 261 ; 
and the family, 98. 

Society Islands, 181. 

Solidarity, 212, 213, 251; religious, 
220. 

Solomon Islands, 180. 

Soul, the, 37; separable from the 
body, 37; its continued exist- 
ence, 38. 

Spells, and prayers, 150, 151, 152, 
i53, i55, i57, 160, 164. 

Spencer and Gillen, 45, 46, 164, 
197. 



Spinning, 78, 79. 

Spirits, 162, 170; not essential to 
magic, 89, 90, 91 ; and fetiches, 
118, 119; of fetichism and gods 
of polytheism, 128; guardian, 
in; "momentary," and gods, 
135; and prayer, 166; and 
morality, 215, 217, 219; not 
worshipped, 216. 

Spring customs, 192, 198, 203. 

Squirrel, 76, 78. 

State, the, and justice, 224. 

St. John, Mr., 228. 

Stones, 92, 93, 94. 

Struggle for existence, 264. 

Suhman, 122, 123, 126, 136. 

Sun, 153, 157. 

Superstition, 150. 

Sympathetic magic, 80, 85, 93, 
iS3» *57» 162. 

Taboo, 186 ff., 222, 229, 231-234, 

250. 
Talents, 253. 
Tana, 181. 
Tanner, John, 143. 
Tari, 181, 183. 
Taro, 92, 93, 94. 
Temples, 178. 
Test, of perfection in society, 

255. 
Thanks, do not need words, 181, 

185. 
Thank-offerings, 181. 
Thomsen, Professor, 134. 
Tibetan Buddhists, 150. 
Tiger, 74, 89. 
Tjumba, 181. 
Tonga, 181. 
Totems, 51, 165, 166, 197, 203; 

eating of, 186. 
Trade wind, 101. 
Transmigration, 51, 61, 119, 120; 

of character, 64. 
Truth, 25; and value, 10. 
Tupinambas, 56, 58. 



INDEX 



283 



Tylor, Professor, 37, 47, 56, 112, 
141-144, 147, 148, 150, 161, 166. 

Unalits, 59, 60. 

Uncle John, knows his own pipe, 

49. 50. 
Uniformity of nature, 14; matter 

of faith, not of knowledge, 15. 
Unselfishness, developes and does 

not weaken individuality, 67. 
Usener, Professor, 128, 131, 133. 
Utilitarianism, 240, 242. 

Value, 7; literary and artistic, 8, 
9; religious, 8, 9, 10, 107, 108, 
109; carries a reference to the 
future, 12; relative to a pur- 
pose or end, 13, 15; of litera- 
ture and art, felt, not proved, 16, 
17; of fetichism, 114, 115, 120; 
of fetichism and religion for 
society, 125; religious, and 
fetichism, 127. 

Virgil, 54. 

West Africa, 152, 153. 
Westermarck, E., 224, 225, 228, 
235. 



Whistling, to produce a wind, 73, 
74, 75- 

Will, the, 13. 

Will to injure, 81. 

Will to live, the, 41 ; involves the 
desire for immortality, 41 ; de- 
nounced by Buddhism, 66. 

Wind, 100, 1 01. 
JWisdom, collective, of man, 237. 

Witch, and witch-doctor, 84. 

Witchcraft, 222, 227. 

Wives, of hunters and warriors, 78. 

Wohkonda, 143. 

Worship, 121, 122, 177, 180, 260; 
and the etymology of "god," 
133 fi\, 137; of gods and of 
fetiches, 123, 134, 135; of the 
community, given to the pow- 
ers that protect it, 126; may 
break up, 170. 

Xenophon, 171. 
Xilonen, 190. 

Yams, 93, 143, 180, 181. 
Yebu, 147. 

Zulus, 194. 



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